Mangold is plainly comfortable with the bare bones materiality of his medium and the mutations to which it lends itself. Likewise he seems at ease with the notion that no realities external to his studio reflection impose their authority upon his choices, and none internal to it carry the weight of unalterable necessity. Art history sets the stage for the decisions he has made, and abstraction’s legacy in particular elaborates and qualifies our understanding of the aspirations and reticences implicit in his oeuvre. Painterly intuition rather than a priori ideas guide his hand. Correspondingly direct, prolongued and repeated experience of mark, form, hue, space, surface, shape and scale is why all the other things that can be said about the larger context for those decisions matters. Insatiable but discriminate looking at the paintings which result from this rigorous empiricism is the basis of out bond with their maker. R. Storr, “Betwixt and Between,” Robert Mangold, London, 2000, p. 78