Art in America
SANTO DOMINGO
Joan Thorne a Retrospective Exhibition at Casa de Bastidas
This midcareer retrospective, which included some 40 works covering 25 years, was a vivid reminder that abstract painting has sustained many an artist, and many a viewer, through the frantic cycles of art-world fashion in recent decades. Since 1973, while myriad styles, movements and mediums have flourished briefly in turn, Joan Thorne has steadfastly developed one visual language-that of painterly surface, light, color and distilled form-which she finds best suited for her artistic project: intimating dreams. intuitions and the psychic consequences of travel.
The Spanish colonial Casa de Bastidas, with its heavily beamed ceilings, tile floors and tropical courtyard. was in many ways an ideal setting for this work, For there is something luxuriant and mysterious in Thorne's compositions. They have a classic modernist genealogy that encompasses Dove, O'Keeffe, Hartley, Avery and Tobey; yet each carries a hint of exoticism, Operating in the spirit of Matisse in Morocco or Gauguin in the South Seas, this native-born New Yorker has made repeated working sojourns in Italy (especially Siena, following her Prix de Rome in 1986) and the Dominican Republic (which she first visited in 1993).
Thorne's works from the '70s are action paintings, large in scale (nearly 9 feet high) and thickly streaked-their long, fervid squiggles evocative, at a distance, of dense foliage cast in unlikely pale blue, lilac and sickly green. The oil paint (Thorne's unvarying medium) is slathered, dragged and gouged not only with wide brushes and a palette knife but also, sometimes, with fingers and feet. In the '80s. this physicality moderates; the forms, though still jagged and highly energized, become more substantial, brightening in their yellows, greens, blues and reds as they engage in a swirling dance. Finally, with the '90s, both moderate-sized painting and smaller oil-stick drawings show a consolidation into a few floating but relatively stable forms, nearly geometric but still rippling with hints of organicism. The colors. more richly saturated than ever, narrow mostly to the primaries.
Thus Thorne's formal trajectory through the decades has arced from initial agitation (expressed in gestural automatism) to the visual equivalent of jazz-ballet choreography to her present hovering-shape contemplativeness. Centering on a few largish, chromatically intense forms in limbo, the current work is thoroughly assured-though still, thankfully, too vital to be serene. The early phases of the artist's career were marked by numerous New York shows and two inclusions in the Whitney Biennial (1973, 1981). Exhibitions have been somewhat rarer of late. Has the art world come to such a pass. one wonders, that maturity of vision now equals exile?
-Richard Vine
Joan Thorne: Mythical Journeys, Power and Flight Robert C. Morgan, 2001
June 1998
Wild Beauty by Stephen Westfall, essay for the catalogue of the Retrospective Exhibition at Museo de Las Americas, Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2000
Straight Painting, by Robert C. Morgan, essay for the brochure of group exhibition at the PaintingCenter, New York, 2000
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