His works were wall-bound paintings, yet remained somewhere between low relief and sculpture, activating the wall and the environment around them. Yet, like many artists, he was not content and continued his restless exploration of painting.

In the early 1970s, Kauffman moved from his increasingly atmospheric plastic relief paintings to a new kind of painted construction. Rather than continuing to produce the luminous works that established his reputation, or to proceed with light installations that he had successfully begun, Kauffman realized that he wanted to return to the studio. He wanted to renew and engage with his love of painting.

Kauffman began working at the intersection of diverse concerns; from the beauty of Asian garden gates and Japanese tea houses, to Mexican beach shacks; from observations of buildings with curving arches and open windows, to the commonplace studio interior.

He didn’t disappear, he just moved across town. By early 1952, Kauffman had transferred to UCLA for the fine art program, majoring in painting. But the interest and ability in architectural drawing stayed with him, providing him with skills and methods in planning, spatial conception and drawing. For this series, Kauffman was the architect, the builder, and the painter—all within his own studio domain.

When it came to the Constructed Paintings some two decades later, line drawings, in black ink or graphite, are the first encounter with the ideas for Kauffman. The line is direct and never tentative. Rather, it is bold and laid down with authority. There is no use of shading, and the line is free, although it describes form as if the line were a type of building material.

A framework built out of linear elements, as Kauffman defines the architecture. That framework, a kind of scaffolding, is then built in wood—stick by stick. It’s as if Kauffman were making a small human-scale structure on which to hang his color and feeling. After the lines are composed, and the building is done, the color notes are applied, with each color often specified in a list on the drawing.

The Constructed Paintings are very much related to the 1972–73 press-formed plastic paintings that are like simple wooden boards, or construction materials. As Kauffman said in an interview: “…then I went into forming those pieces that were only seen in Paris: some bars, and there are some that are like boards….I just called them bars. They're sort of like boards. They're actually done over boards, put on sort of like the boards on a house around here. They had a more kind of local building-material quality to them.” ⁵

By 1973, he exhibited those bar paintings, in both horizontal and vertical formats, in a solo show at Galerie Darthea Speyer in Paris.⁶ His Paris shows concluded in 1976, with a large solo show of the constructed paintings at Galerie Darthea Speyer. The show included paintings that Kauffman worked on while he was living in Paris between 1975 and 1976.

Travel had always been a huge source for Kauffman, especially direct contact with nature. Among the sources for imagery and color used in the Constructed Paintings were his trips to Baja California, where he saw rustic beach shanties, with colorful walls.

He went to Baja California with his painter friend Tony DeLap, and the two soaked up the atmosphere as well as the rustic architecture. Kauffman was taken by the structures on the beach, as well as the sparse interiors of some of the houses, which seemed to him to be much more interesting than American minimalism. He also made note of the colors, clearly, whether those are the bright colors associated with the Mexican folk art, or the subtle faded colors that he used in a painting like Le Grille Mexicaine.

Kauffman had also traveled to Asia, where he saw Japanese teahouses, the small ceremonial structures, often attributed to individual tea masters. These are set within the grounds of Buddhist temple gardens, which are surrounded or guarded by walls and gates. Kauffman had an interest in the tea ceremony, since his early days at UCLA, when he and a friend developed affection for the revered Buddhist ceremony, with its attention to detail and presence. The role of the guardian is foretold by Kauffman’s title of the second work in the series, Shi Tzu.⁸ The Mandarin name "Shih Tzu" directly translates to "lion," an animal considered sacred in Buddhist religion.

He had returned to Paris during a longer stay, from late 1959 through 1962, and lived on Rue Git Le Couer, next to the famed Beat Hotel. During this second trip, he met the abstract artists Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, as well as Darthea Speyer, who would later become his dealer in the 1970s. She was instrumental in securing the studio that Kauffman used at Cite Des Arts during 1976, where a number of the Constructed Paintings were made.

As evidence of Kauffman’s love of French painting, one only needs to look at the titles of the paintings in this series: Cité Rouge, L'Indien, Les Primaires Selon Young, Toit Ouvrant, and Fenetre #1.

Fenetre #1 refers, perhaps, to a window in his Paris studio, but also to the origins of modernism in French painting. Matisse had often painted open windows, viewed from an interior. Kauffman also constructed the framework for Toit Ouvrant (which translates to “sunroof”) on the floor of that same Paris studio, incorporating elements of the larger paintings into a compact composition.

We know the singular fascination that Craig Kauffman had with plexiglass. Museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Pasadena have been important homes for Kauffman’s work (I remember a kind of orange-brown palisade stripped in the middle as if the sun reached through it). However, for the last year and a half, Kauffman has only used canvas and wood. His latest works, exhibited at the Galerie Darthea Speyer, are resolutely austere. They are windows of roofs, partly perforated, open to nothingness. Here and there wings, nascent and cropped, wayward flaps prolong moments while timidly and meekly floating in fragile space like a carnival canvas. The colors, in turn, have something modest about them: tossed about, already chipped, sometimes abolished. Off-white, yellow, pink, geranium. Arte Povera? Analytical art? Both, no doubt. Art arising from his instruments alone, a reflection as tenuous as possible of a fragmented world. –Translation of article to the left

Regarding the structure, when questioned about the relationship of the linear wood and painted areas to the negative space of the Constructed Paintings, Kauffman simply stated that “the structure is the image, the beginnings of the image. And it’s self-supporting, and independently strong. That’s been a preoccupation of mine since the plastic pieces; those were all self-supporting.” ⁹

Open spaces of the wall also are employed to activate the color and structure. This use of the negative space is something that Kauffman carried over from his extensive interest in the way that paintings interact with the wall, and how the viewer perceives the piece in relation to the environment.

In Wooster Orange, as well as Caroline’s Rickets and Left Entrance, the artist also makes use of an unusual substructure to the side of the main painting. The right hand panel is a kind of “outrigger,” a smaller but related part of the artwork. In other examples like Left Entrance, the substructure is joined by diagonals, as if it were a building addition. It is through the integration of color, linear structure and shape that he achieved the architectural presence of his Constructed Paintings. The works reflect Kauffman’s life-long interest in unorthodox supports for painting, as well as a sensuous and luminous color sensibility.