Olafur Eliasson meets... Ellsworth Kelly

In 1969 Ellsworth Kelly made Spectrum V (left), which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In that same year Kelly wrote "Notes of 1969," a meandering tract of attached sentences about his work, his inspiration, and the lineage in which he considered himself. (He edited some of the notes in 1993.)

"My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved or square," Kelly wrote. "I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves." And later: "I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a very personal handwriting, putting marks on canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something which has a different use."

Kelly's Spectrum works, especially the horizontal ones, are where presence meets color. When they were painted, mostly in the 1960s, they must have seemed preposterously huge. (Today, when we're well-accustomed to big paintings, it takes architecture to equal the same kind of presence. The Baltimore Ravens' very purple football stadium is my favorite example.) If you stand in front of one of the Spectrum paintings and look from the left to the right realfast, you understand what Kelly means by paintings that have a different use. They aren't ephemeral or phenomenological like Light & Space work, but they are Presence & Color. That's in the same league, just in a different division. (This one is SLAM's Spectrum II.)

Which brings us to Olafur Eliasson and his 360-degree room for all colours (2002). The piece is a giant, circular room in which the colors of the walls gradually change. The effect is both soothing and creepy -- I actually felt my eyes adjusting to the different colors and to the varying brightness of the light.

Eliasson's room isn't anywhere near as totemic as Kelly's canvases, but they share some chromatic effects. The subtle variations in color pulls the eye through Kelly's canvases, and when I'm standing in Eliasson's room my eyes want to race around his wall the way a hamster races around its wheel. As in Kelly's work there are no marks in 360 indicate that an artist was here, Eliasson is trying to create the same kind of "presence" that Kelly did. And he succeeds.

Previously: Related: Olafur Eliasson meets... art history. Pieter de Hooch. Richard Serra. Vija Celmins.