Painted not with gray pigment at all, but rather zinc white, old Holland bright green, Scheveningen orange and cobalt blue, this seemingly monochromatic painting is thus made up of multiple layers of translucent colors, each layer covering the whole canvas. Beginning with a finely worked surface of white chalk ground, de Crignis built up the painted surface of such works with alternate layers of horizontal and vertical brushstrokes using veils of color, such as ultramarine blue, white, Scheveningen orange, silver, radiant lemon yellow and gold. The effect is a seemingly infinite depth of space as light enters the uninflected perfect surface and interacts with the white ground and the overlying layers of color. As de Crignis commented, “I use the art of painting to represent color as the transparent appearance of light.” Or as Ken Johnson wrote in The New York Times in reviewing the 2004 show at Peter Blum Gallery where this work was acquired, “Looking at the gray paintings, which are made with no actual gray color, it is hard to tell if the pinks or greens that emerge are in the paint itself or in your eyes or in your mind. (James Turrell’s Minimalist light sculpture has a similar effect). At once formally severe and materially luxurious, Mr. de Crignis’s paintings bridge the gap between the perceptual and the transcendental.”
