Marcia Roberts was born and raised in Los Angeles where she attended Hollywood High School. She received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Connecticut College and studied at Falmouth School of Art, Falmouth England. During the 1970's Roberts established her studio in Santa Monica where her interest in light and space led to experimentation with various technologies and materials. MARCIA ROBERTS: LIGHTs AND SPACESBy Peter FrankIn the expansive constellation of artists associated with the Light & Space movement, Marcia Roberts occupies an early and prominent, but complex, position. Roberts’ painting displays all the visual and intellectual earmarks of what (passim Robert Irwin) can best be labeled “Perceptualism” – geometric formal language; flat, crisp, yet luminous color; formulations – or, if you would, images -- that play upon the inexactitude and even gullibility of human sight; and a fragile, almost fleeting visual presence, in which dazzling luminosity co-exists, even co-operates with near-invisibility. But the elemental nature, or at least appearance, of Roberts’ style, relying on clear but softly rendered planes suspended or engulfed in illusory space – or non-space, more atmosphere than volume – reveals a tension in the work between elegant, neo-classic clarity and vibrant baroque tonality. Many of Roberts’ fellow Perceptualists realize similarly self-contrasting, even contradictory conditions in their work. But Light & Space artists working in two dimensions such as Ronald Davis and Mary Corse tend to rely on the physical characteristics of their media in order to complicate viewers’ apprehension, while more sculpturally oriented artists such as Helen Pashgian and Larry Bell exploit or even efface their objects as sources of para-optical phenomena. The optical effects in Roberts’ paintings, by contrast, clearly distinguish themselves from their support. Notable among her Perceptualist peers, Roberts takes a pictorial approach to the making of a visual structure. She does not paint illusions but paints pictures of illusions. She tricks our eyes not so much into seeing into fictive space as into seeing fictive renditions suspended in that fictive space. “Space” remains unarticulated, even as its visible presence asserts itself. Throughout her half-century-plus career Roberts has consistently plied such a pictorial, even picturesque approach. (This explains her adherence to the medium of painting, which uniquely makes such an approach viable.) Also throughout, her oeuvre bifurcates typologically, positing on the one hand the presence of structures occupying painterly space, thus rendering it recessive, and on the other hand presenting us with an immanent spectral radiance (in fact many such radiances) into which all sense of depth dissolves. The picture plane acts as a looking glass through which these unearthly events, these astral metamorphoses, can be explored either as meditative flow or cataclysmic eruption – or perhaps the result of each other. As such, Roberts’ work aligns historically with more than Light & Space – although, as an artist born and bred in postwar California, her context is squarely rooted in that movement. Her presentation of planes-as-objects within planes-as-spaces, and the formal distortions that result, can be sourced in the Op art of the 1960s. Her single-color panels rippling with the subtlest of inflections connect her to the monochrome painting which intersected with Light & Space in the 1970s and ‘80s in Los Angeles and to the radikale Malerei which centered in San Francisco and similarly in Germany and Switzerland. It might even be argued that Roberts is also connected to east coast Minimalism, at least through these other directions. But clearly, her relationship to the reductive tenets of Minimal Art is twice removed. Instead of answeringto Frank Stella’s admonition that “what you see is what you see,” Roberts, like her Perceptualist compeers, asks, “Is what you see what you see?” Also like her fellow Perceptualists – but, as a painter, even more than they in some regard -- Roberts is engaged in the perpetuation of a distinctly North American aesthetic, that is, way of seeing. Such an aesthetic does not concern the elusiveness of the seen so much as it does the varied effects of light, and how light impacts the viewer as more than just a function of vision. Light has preoccupied American, including Canadian, painters for centuries, recognizing its visceral qualities as key to bringing their pictures to life. We can say the same thing, of course, about Caravaggio and Rembrandt, about the Impressionists, Turner and Constable, even Caspar David Friedrich and Vilhelm Hammershoi, among many others. But American light – Western Hemisphere light – is not European light (even California’s “Mediterranean light,” Roberts’ native glow, is distinct from the light of the literal littoral), and American painters, whether in New York or New Mexico, have long acknowledged this. The Luminism of Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade could only have occurred on this side of the Atlantic. This reliance on and celebration of American light and its manifold variants animates Roberts’ painting from the core outward and ties her to a tradition that transcends modern tendentiousness no less than it does academic stricture. Light, so fugitive in European art, tends to the immutable over here. It might change with the weather in certain regions at certain times (and, increasingly, in certain climactic disruptions), but it changes back again to the almost palpable, plasmatic yet crystalline vibrancy that blankets the continent. And herein lies the key to Roberts’ own modality: for all the seeming elusiveness of her light-enmeshed shapes and spaces, she proposes an optical stability, a dependability, however tenebrous, that answers Frank Stella’s dictum from an oblique angle: What you see is also what you see, because you can see it. Roberts empowers the viewer’s eye even as she teases it. It’s an invitation to the dance, as it were, a chance for the eye to participate actively in the dynamic that drives Roberts’ pictorial thinking. It is as if the viewer were watching a magician perform sleight-of-hand, knowing full well that the hat tricks and card flips have their rules and structures but responding anyway with awe and delight. Painters have fooled the eye from the moment the easel replaced the fresco, but only the eye that wants to be fooled can be. To the eye that wants to see only what it sees, the work of a painter like Marcia Roberts is a prolonged exercise in design and lighting, elegant and proper. To the eye that sees beyond, that enters a perceptual conspiracy with Roberts and her slabs and spectra, a mesmerizing terrain opens up.