Thomas Waller reviews Irene Small’s recent book, The Organic Line, for the April 2025 edition of The Brooklyn Rail. Click here to read the review. Click here to read more about the book. An excerpt appears below:

“Spatial intervals between surfaces are not limited to their modernist expression, and have often been creatively harnessed by artists, as in the tradition of pendant painting. Yet, as Small argues, with Clark this negative space is raised to a principle of composition, altering our perception of what came before and after her. Through a series of attentive readings that reinterpret canonical modernists in the light of Clark’s discovery (Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier), as well as more speculative engagements with contemporary artists such as Adam Pendleton and Maria Eichhorn, Small establishes the organic line as a paradigm that ripples beyond and across art history, exceeding its original instantiation in Clark’s oeuvre.

In their most minimal iteration, painterly lines are graphic traces that carve, cleave, and delimit, introducing duality into a work or partitioning the representation of space. What Clark happened upon is different, however, because, in Small’s words, it is “a line devoid of a mark.” Effacing rather than elevating the intention of the artist, it is registered in the real time of the aesthetic experience of the beholder, who “activates” the work by pulling negativity into the sphere of meaning. To this extent, the organic line both pre-exists and outlasts the viewer’s encounter with it, pertaining to the real void between two abutting planes. The resulting tension between visual perception and material structure, or between activation and contingency, gives rise to the self-legislating quality of Clark’s abstractions, which disrupt hard and fast distinctions between where the work stops and the surrounding world begins.”