Straight Painting
I like the title of this exhibition because it tells the story like it is Straight painting. Indeed, there is a lot of painting going around these days
that is not straight, a lot of cyborg-figuration painting and a lot of cartoon clutter. So the question is-what kind of painting, are we talking about?
In the age of the internet, we are infested with images, bombarded day-in and out by images galore: comicbook characters and ghastly unimaginative
replicants emerge every time we strike a key. As we slide into the feudal estate of the Internet, the unmagical
nonkingdom of commercial repetition and cyberspatial despair begins to take hold. Images arc like lice. We are
unaware of their effect until we are compelled to scratch. Once we scratch the surface, we begin to realize that images are
merely skin deep. There is nothing below the surface. Yet the annoyance on the surface of the skin begins to spread and suddenly
we are deluged by an unpleasant sensation that requires an ontological ointment, a lotion that will curtail the automatic reproduction of these puny pixels.
Such a rapid-fire dissemination of imagery puts pressure on artists who still consider themselves painters. it is about time to realize
that images are one thing, but painting is something else. There are those who will argue that a painting is also an image, but I would
argue that an image is generally a representation that occurs aftcr the painting has been reproduced. Is it no wonder that so much
emphasis is given to the color photo of the painting in art magazines or to the quality of resolution on the raster? But the painting
itself is something else. It is not a sign, but the referent to which the sign refers. Painting-and I am thinking specifically of abstract painting
is a physical flatland that signifies a world beyond representation, a world of tactile substance, a signifier that puts us
in touch with the actuality of things as they are. Abstract painting is most important in this regard. It redefines the physical world
through tension and balance, through an Ineluctable stability of forces, progressing toward a state of resolve and thus communication on a whole different level.
Straight painting is a kind of blessing in today's art world, but it is not a blessing in disguise. Abstract painting should exist as a physical fact-a
reality of pigment and shape, line and color, tension and balance. Its physicality should be as material as its signifying propertics should be immaterial.
Literalness in painting has limits. For this reason, we can say that Stella was inaccurate in 1959 with his oft-quotcd statement:
"What you see is what you see." Today we can say that painting is not so much about what you see, but how you think in relation to the act of seeing.
Straight painting implies abstraction, rather than representation; but even that proposition is up for grabs after postmodernism.
All abstract painting becomes representational to some degree in that modernism has presumably revealed all angles of the painter's vocabulary.
According to this logic, anything done in the present is simply a representation of the past. From a painters viewpoint (which is not a theorist's)
this kind of thinking is absurd. Given that painting-straight painting-is fundamentally derived from one's experience with the medium, we can also talk
about painting as a process or an action, a gestural response to an internalized phenomena.
James Little is an abstract painter, an aggressive organizer of abstract painting shows, and a champion of the cause of straight painting.
In looking closely at his work there is a deepened sense of commitment-the kind of coturnitment that is required of any painter who aspires to
signify something deeply felt through an economy of means. Little's economy of means is not Ellsworth Kelly's. It is, perhaps, closer
to Ludwig Sander or other hard-edge painters who struggled for attention in the historical hiatus between abstract expressionism and Pop art.
Little's work is not exempt from feeling. It is more than a formal counterpoise of color shapes. He is concerned with the reduction of shape and its
color identity as is Kelly, but in a more direct and rugged manner. His colors are deliberately off-key. This strengthens the tension within the composition.
There is emphasis on the diagonal cut of the shape, the tension point between the shapes. This suggests a psychological
alertness, a happening based on faith and containment of self in a chaotic world. Little's paintings may be "straight" but they are
ingenious in their formality. The pressure incited between the shapes pushes the tension within the painting to another level, suggesting an
assiduous mind-set worthy of note at the outset of the twenty-first century.
Joan Thorne's career as an abstract painter has been in evidence for more than a quarter of a century. She was included in Sam Hunter's New Directions catalog from the Commodities Corporation in Princeton in 1981. Her work represents a position of postformalism or lyric abstraction-the natural extension of
Color Field painting in the sixties. Thorne has always maintained an independent position as a painter-a position articulated by the critic Ann Dumas.
Thorne managed to comprehend the tactility and resonance of painting as something that would not give way or relinquish itself to postmodern strategies.
Her work has always been on the edge-and for a painter to remain on the edge, in abstract terms, is also a psychological position, an outsider position,
with relation to visual culture. As Dumas so elegantly writes, Thorne's work is "contained in monolithic forms suspended majestically in their ambient fields
of sonorous color" (Arts,June 1991). The point of tension between her shapes is gesturally conceived. Her paintings retain the power of
turbulence akin to natural forces hovering in space, a galactic space in which constellations are deferred, held in abeyance by earthly manifestations of
geologic time, turbulently exposed and torrentially animated.
Stewart Hitch, another postformalist renegade who emerged in the seventies, has made a series of interesting
and significant statements as a painter working through the means of painting. Not an imagist, Hitch has always
maintained a kind of truth to the referent-in fact, to the frame, the support, if you will. But Hitch also
understands that there is a tension between the frame and how one perceives what is held within it. For this
reason Hitch shifted from the more minimally reduced canvases of the seventies to a more complex figuration of
rectangles and ovals in the late eighties. This shift was not exactly a visual tromp l'oeil, but it did open
up a new investigation of painting, a fresh means of addressing the surface. The colors are often playful and
aleatory, yet not without expressive content. Again, here is the juncture where the signifying power of literal
process comes into being and makes the painting resonate as more than a sign.
Edward Shalala and David Mackenzie are perhaps more connected with complex maneuvering of paint as material and
formal substance, and less about the notion of support. In this sense, there is an affinity here with the postmodern:
the notion of being on the surface through shape, color, and textural overlay. Stylistically, the two painters are
quite different from one another. Of the two, Shalala is more intent on presenting an all-over look a deeply rich
color/texture that carries a certain consistency without concern for a figure to ground relationship. Mackenzie,
on the other hand, plays with the density of the figure to ground interrelationship of shapes and patterns. This
overlay affords a constantly sliding sense of the spatial field.
The impact of this exhibition is toward reviving a sense of what painting can be as process, as experience, and
as rejuvenation of formal structure. These concerns were too easily passed-by in the eighties and nineties in
favor of imagism and a certain weirdly dolorous sentimentality. Of Course, these five painters selected for this
exhibition arc about as far from Neo-Expressionism as one might imagine. For this reason they are not in the same
league as the cyber-figurations adored by commercially-driven critics who broker the latest smart art.
Maintaining vigilance with regard to what is significant in painting-indeed, what is significant in art-despite
the pressure to give in to something less considered, is still a true and noble task. One hopes that vigilance in
painting will eventually reap the rewards it deserves with an audience who is willing to take the time, to slow down
and look.
-Robert C. Morgan
Joan Thorne: Mythical Journeys, Power and Flight Robert C. Morgan, 2001
Essay For Group Painting Exhibition
The Painting Center
New York, New York
October 2000
Joan Thorne a Retrospective Exhibition at Casa de Bastidas, by Richard Vine Art in America, 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
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