1968 (ramparts) is a painted and carved relief from the Swiss period of Ben Nicholson’s career that uses key elements of his personally distinctive abstract idiom. In contrast to the white reliefs of the thirties, with their cool uniform finish and rectilinear geometry, Nicholson’s Swiss period reliefs created an intelligent tension between varied material texture and lucid, irregular shapes. 1968 (ramparts) is composed from eight irregular shaped planes, four around the edge and four clustered at the centre. No two adjacent planes are the same, though each one is painted with varying degrees of transparency. Three inner planes are incised with perfectly drawn circles, cut into the board at varying depths (the circle scratched into the red panel at lower right is only visible on close inspection). The finesse of such incisions contrasts with the substantial thickness of the board itself, which projects several centimetres from the backboard, which is also painted. Each plane jostles for position but together they interact as an animated ensemble, suggestive of a pulsing inner life. As in the best of Nicholson’s art, 1968 (ramparts) resembles a complex and intractable puzzle awaiting the viewer’s sustained attention.

The refinement of 1968 (ramparts) and other contemporaneous reliefs derived from Nicholson’s exquisitely controlled manipulation of surfaces and relief. Each surface was scraped down by a razor until it resonated with every other component. By continuously working the inert substance of the pavatex board, a kind of locally manufactured industrial material, Nicholson came to identify with his materials and eventually came to extract from them a rich sense of associative meaning.

Motivating Nicholson’s subtle craftsmanship was a profound, spiritual appreciation of art and its ability to carry ideas. A year before 1968 (ramparts) was made, he explained to the art historian Charles Harrison his peculiar appreciation for relief carving. He referred to his ‘conception of working the “idea” into the material’, and went on:

"It’s also a reason why I prefer working relief to working on canvas – canvas tends to be stretched more easily into a conventional form whereas a board can be carved into any form – and it can become an object and not only an everyday object but one containing an idea beyond this temporary existence."

As with all of Nicholson’s art, the title of 1968 (ramparts) is allusive. He started using the formula of year (subtitle) in 1950, after his first modernist phase in which pictures were identified almost exclusively by their date alone. (As time passed and more work was made, this system became congested and unmanageable.) In a letter of 1979, he referred to the ‘tag titles’ attached to his works. Rather than prescribing the ‘idea’ of a work by pinning it to some external point of reference, Nicholson’s intention was to create in art ‘a form of life more real than life itself.’ Tag titles like ‘ramparts’ provide a reflection of that intense form of life.

With reference to other works produced in 1968 and the preceding years, it is possible to triangulate the source of inspiration for 1968 (ramparts). Nicholson travelled to Crete in the spring of 1966 and to several Greek islands in May 1967, and later that year he visited the Loire Valley. The tag titles of other works from 1967 and 1968 include references to Tuscany – more specifically Pisa, Lucca and San Gimignano – and to Paros and Delos. 1968 (ramparts) suggests some grand old structure built with stone, a castle or hilltop fortress, wreathed in a halo of light and air. No specific representational unit is apparent. The jaunty ⏗ shape, painted black, hinges together adjacent planes, and the whole structure leans downward to the right with the inevitability of a monument that has settled into place over time. The different levels of each plane, some projecting and some recessed, create a complex layering of shapes in space.

1968 (ramparts) must have been worked upon and brought to completion in the early part of the year 1968, as it was finished in time to be shown in Galerie Beyeler's exhibition that year, which opened in April, and reproduced in the accompanying publication.

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In March 1958, Ben Nicholson left his home and studio in St Ives for Switzerland. He settled near Lake Maggiore and dedicated himself to making painted reliefs and drawings of landscape and still life, almost entirely to the exclusion of pure painting. As John Russell noted in 1969, it was ‘more than ten years since Ben Nicholson produced a major painting, if by ‘painting’ we understand a picture painted in oils on canvas.’ Following a decade of awards and critical celebration, including the ‘Ulissi’ Prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale and the First International Prize for Painting at São Paulo in 1957, Nicholson was buoyed with enthusiasm and creative zeal. His move to mainland Europe marked the start of a productive period in his oeuvre.

Nicholson’s work of the sixties was governed by an intense engagement with his surroundings: the striking landscapes and historical sites which he encountered in the Canton of Ticino, as well as those he discovered on travels to Italy, Greece, Portugal and France. Pencil drawing and carved painted relief were parallel mediums in his practice at that time, and he used both as vehicles of expression to capture the ‘idea’ of these newly discovered European environments.

Although his work was not always representational, it was systematically related to the places he experienced. Working as a kind of equivalent, his abstract reliefs of this period suggest the weathered patina of ancient buildings. Nicholson used a direct and physical process, scratching the hard board and scraping away layers of applied paint. By roughening and incising the support and revealing underlayers of wood and colour, Nicholson composed a subtly interlocking surface notable for its rich textures.