Introduction (from Pageant)
by John Ashbery

IF ALL ART ASPIRES toward the condition of music as Pater wrote, Trevor Winkfield must be counted among the most successful artists of all time.

A picture such as his great, recent Voyage II totally fulfills that condition: the accuracy and surprises of great music even its linear unscrolling, are what confront us. In fact its effect is the same one a musical score offers a person with some ability for reading music - "sight-reading." Each element in the painting has its precise pitch, its duration. It's as though seeing and hearing merged in a single act, and the "meaning" of the picture were lodged at the intersection of two of the senses where one is pleasurably enmeshed, deliciously hindered.

The strange erection on the left - a toy windmill with dysfunctional looking paddles (isn't it from the coat of arms of some ancient and distinguished purveyor of something-or-other to the Royal Family?), firmly placed on a pedestal fashioned of bricks, tomatoes and other less namable objects, is there to cast the authority of its key-signature over the frieze on the right, whose elements include a harp, a seagull, some nautical-looking pennants, three table utensils tied together with a red bow, and at the far right some wave-like scallops and stylized drops of water that suggest the musical symbol for da capo al fine - go back and start all over again, you idiot! (One of the heroes in Winkfield's pantheon is Satie, author of a short piano piece called Vexations that is meant to be repeated 840 times.)

There are also three identical hands, each one a different hue and each holding what may be an empty ice-cream cone (but the third cone has something attached to it that looks like a drooping slice of flan.) There are two sculptural heads, one Greek, the other that of a medieval bigwig, Charlemagne perhaps; both are gazing to the left (westward), where the music is coming from, and each is bathed in a different light, for which no source is apparent.

These are the describable things, but there are less identifiable ones on which the same amount of objective care has been lavished: three-dimensional grids; stripes and colored lines; some stylized leaves at the top; and the Greek figure's curious torso, like a child's top. The colors are those of brand-new but antique toys that have been randomly stacked together: intense pastel greens, banana-yellow, vermilion, chartreuse, Tabasco red, Kool-Aid grape: an assembly whose components ought to "scream at" each other, but which are instead intoning something ineffable, some music of the spheres, though the spheres appear to be rolling around on the floor of a nursery rather than in the heavens.

One could go on listing and describing, "to small purpose and with less effect" in the words of Winkfield's friend, the late James Schuyler. What's clear is that there is no verbal equivalent for taking in the picture, just as there is none for assimilating a piece of music, which is as it should be.

The experience in both cases amounts to what? Perhaps the very what in Jasper Johns' title According to What. Something is regulating everything and placing its parts in the proper relation to each other, but that thing is unknown: a blank, though a fundamental one.

One reflects on how so much modern art is concerned with dropping things out: the momentous vacancies in Cezanne, in Cubist still-lifes, in Henry Moore's holes, in Giacometti's erasures. And how an equally important activity has been filling things up again: how the ashen, empty glasses in Picasso's 1910 still-lifes are brimming with violent-colored lemonade, Suze and cassis after 1914.

Winkfield has somehow managed to combine both of these natural impulses to drain and to replenish, to build and to destroy. And he locates the core of creation precisely there, at the plimsoll line where the glass is both half empty and half full, where ecstasy means having exactly enough.