Al Held identified himself as a "painter of synthetic constructs." At the beginning of his career in the late 1950s he was very involved in the New York-based abstract expressionism movement. He started out with what he identified as a natural tendency to "structure the brush stroke, to have some order to it." His initial explorations in this context have been characterized as "pigment paintings," works constructed with impasto bands of color, done by painting wet into wet.
After his early experiments with the form, he found the need to "get rid of abstractionist ambiguities." The resulting evolution of his work led to the creation of "clearer and cleaner" geometric shapes, beginning with a series of letterform paintings, each with a specific identity. He found himself creating works that were reflective of what he characterized as "increasingly reductive thinking."
He found the idea of reductivism to be "fatiguing" and decided that he needed "to rethink my whole world view." While the geometry in his compositions remained, the impetus now was "to develop a language about multiplicity and complexity, to find a way of expressing how I feel about things that can't be seen, tasted, heard, etc."
He used the language of geometry to create found images which combine random and multiple perspectives in a single composition. The result is often a dazzling, sometimes hallucinatory variation of points of view that intersect, divide, and overlap. But it is not a simple mechanistic approach. "I use perspective as another formal tool, not as a system."
As he painted, layers of images emerged. When he was not happy with a particular image he painted over it as he searched for a new point of attack or perspective. Meanwhile, he kept the surface of the painting free of pentimenti by using an industrial strength disc sander to remove the offending layers of acrylic paint. This technique ultimately provided the completed painting with a smooth, seamless integration of his generally multiple revisions that have been joined to form the final design.
