Frank Stella’s Cantahar is a large-scale painting from the artist’s ‘Imaginary Places’ series. For this series, Stella sourced his titles from the 1980 book, Dictionary of Imaginary Places which catalogs over a thousand fictional lands featured throughout the history of literature.

The motif of the smoke ring has preoccupied Stella throughout his career and here it prominently weaves it way throughout the painting. From 1990, Stella began using technology to digitally render smoke ring forms using 3-dimensional computer imaging programs. He saw the floating smoke form as a means towards reconsidering the working space of painting. The artist described the motif as ‘a gesture that is intrinsically part of space, integrated into it. It doesn’t sit in front of space and it isn’t in the background. It’s like a molecular part of it. I’ve always wished I could do that with a painted gesture.’

© 2021 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.