Ellsworth Kelly- La Combe I
C.S. Peirce was a semiologist who categorized signs into three groups, the Icon, the Index and the symbol. The notion of the index is that of a sign which has an un-coded relationship to it point of signification. When we see smoke we think of fire, when we see a foot print we think of a foot, when we see the shadow of a bottle we think of a bottle. These are signs which are not read primarily as themselves but as a direct relationship to a related being. The phenomenon of these signs creation requires a causal link, where one is a product of the other through a transference which does not take a removed step.
Rosalind Krauss discusses the idea of the index in regards to a series of artists. Once artist she does not discuss at length, but whose work her principles have been extensively applied to is Ellsworth Kelly.
Kelly’s work, such as ‘La Combe I’ (1951) initially appear to be images of pure abstraction, fitting in closely with the hard edged rigidity of post painterly abstraction. Yet the works are the product of a direct relationship with the indexical sign.
‘La Combe I’ is a large paneled work, consisting of a series of varying black stripes across the vertical of each white panel. Each strip is tightly painted on, devoid of any clear relation to the artists touch. The patterns are a direct translation of the patterns of light which came through Kelly’s apartment window and sat as shadows against his bedroom wall. He recorded the patterns rigorously and has represented them here.
Such shadows, when seen in the context of his room, are clearly indexical signs, referring primarily to the sensation of light piercing the window frames. Yet it would be incorrect to describe Kelly painting as an indexical sign. Once divorced of the spatial context of his rooms the patterns are separated from their direct and unfiltered or coded association to the passing of light through a window. They find a certain aesthetic autonomy. The index is broken through the fracturing and destabilizing of the sign, as the point of signification is lost once the signifier is relocated.
This linguistic trick is the core of Kelly’s work. What is enables him to do is capture the phenomenon of the natural world but to move beyond mimetic and illustrative representation. He is able to produce something with the aesthetic freedom of abstraction but the visual sensations of everyday light.
Our eyes dance up and across each panel, celebrating the musical opticality of the drawn line. A visual sensation which would have been transient and passing is held still by Kelly process.
It is no coincidence that Kelly keep returning to windows as a source of inspiration. The shadows from windows which sit on a wall have a unique spatial interplay. They read first as flat lines across a flat surface, but then there is a movement and depth to them created by the perspective and overlaying of lines. The passing of light through a window becomes a vehicle in which to transfer the two fold quality of painting, a surface which speaks to us both as flat and as a frame into which we can read depth. Thus Kelly’s transference of these lines of shadows creates a spatial field which we read both through and across.

Kelly’s deliberate depersonalization of the creation ensures this phenomenon is devoid of any of the express layers which exist in abstract expressionism. Kelly wants to remove any veils or codes between the viewer and a direct experience of the sensation he first saw in his bedroom. By removing both the artists touch and the indexical link to the patterns source, Kelly allows us to read the pattern entirely in optical terms.
For all Michael Freid’s myopic formalism, it can’t help be noted that this comes about as close to possible to his ideal values in painting. The irony is that it has been found through a deep and personal engagement with the real world, rather than the Modernist ideal of a purely formal obsession with the spreading of the medium over a two dimensional support.