I saw Robert Storr’s show Fits and Starts at Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York. My criticism begins by naming the space a work produces. For me, this is the point from which the work’s meaning unfolds. With Storr, I call it a space of initiative.
The exhibition text links Storr to Goya’s La Tauromaquia, Plate 21: the bull jumps the barrier and the “safe zone” collapses into panic and death. Force breaks the limit and enters the crowd. Storr translates that breach into abstraction: the barrier becomes a horizontal bar of color inside the painting. The force runs sideways along the surface, without intruding into the viewer’s space.
In the gallery’s central hall, an untitled horizontal painting makes the idea visible.
A red rectangle starts from the center and stretches the composition left and right.
Here initiative is structural: one grid-block begins a movement, sets a direction, and discovers territory for other blocks and colors to appear around it.
Along that red bar, the painting slightly shifts how the architecture of the exhibition space is felt.
Goya shows what happens when force breaks the barrier.
Storr shows force held inside the picture and prolonged sideways.
A rectangle going for a walk.
No diagonals. Only verticals and horizontals running with the wall and floor.
The grid sets where feeling can travel and where it must stop.
As color extends, the grid activates: new rectangles and zones appear along its path.
When this linear push appears, the line stays exposed and a neutral openness remains around it, as if the movement has just begun and the surrounding grid has not yet been settled by saturated colors. This is a decision: Storr extends the edge and the composition to the length of that motion. In square formats, the same initiative folds inward toward the center or disperses differently.
Yes, it recalls Mondrian: verticals, horizontals, rectangles. But Mondrian drives the painting toward a reductive, harmonious balance. Storr shifts the focus: the grid, and even a single grid-block, becomes a subject with agency. It starts a movement, opens territory, and lets intensities stand side by side, distinct, contained, and non-invasive. Freedom here is not breaking the boundaries, but extending them through initiative.
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