Gary Garrels at Artforum:
BRICE MARDEN was an artist for whom intensive looking was essential. To be with him in the studio or in a museum was to focus as hard as possible on the work of art in front of your eyes. Words never disrupted the silence of seeing.
Light was always a fundamental subject of Brice’s work. It is what enables us to see. Different light reveals different aspects of what we observe, opening different experiences. Brice worked with the distinct qualities of light in discrete locations. He loved the light of New York, what he argued was a beautiful, silvery light coming off the water—a northern, colder light that is very clear. By contrast, the light in Hydra, Greece, where he had maintained a home and studio since the early 1970s, was brilliant and intense. The landscape also shifts the effects of light. New York has skyscrapers and steel. Greece has palm, pine, and olive trees. Brice would say that color has to be brought up to the light, that pigment is simply a substance that reacts to light.
more here.