Wild Beauty
One of the most revealing statements about the evolution of Joan Thorne's paintings has been given by the artist herself. Thorne counts watching Cocteau's film, Orphee, as a seminal moment of awakening to the possibilities of painting; specifically a scene where Orpheus walks into a mirror that ripples into liquid as he steps through to another world. All the keys are there for a reading of Thorne's paintings, even if Cocteau's langorous elegance would seem at odds with expressionist intensity of her color and painterly attack. Perhaps most important, the essential formal drama in Thorne's pictorial construction resides in planes that seem to surge and ripple even as they maintain their flatness, and the manner in which these rippling planes of one dominant color open up and give way to other planes of other single dominant colors and which also shimmer and wiggle with bundled swoops of the brush. Looking closer, we immediately discern that each dominant color is actually comprised of at least two different hues that entwine in her brushwork without ever really blending. So a blue planar shape may really be a combination of a tinted ultramarine and straight prussian blues, the first pale and relatively warm to the more electric inkiness of the second. A bright red may be braided with a grey umber so that, while we "feel" red, a shadow seems to fall across our vision. These intervening brushy planes are Thorne's property, nobody does anything quite like them and they map her own pictorial persona: active, adorned, richly colored, and strangely commemorative.
As this retrospective makes clear, the ribbon facture of Thorne's paintings has been there from the beginning. Her surrealist influences carry past Cocteau to the floating biomorphic pictorialism of Miro and forward to the slashing impastos of the Cobra group. The surfaces that fill out her paintings from the early and middle seventies are built up out of thick ribbons of color which writhe against the exposed edges of unpainted canvas as if the spatial field described by the color was itself alive. Even as the "abstract," oblong planar forms that continue to inhabit her work twenty-five years later emerge from these spatial thickets, the thickets themselves can be read as possessing a quality of active being, and this allover animate quality has also remained in her subsequent work.
By the early eighties, the unpainted canvas has entirely disappeared from Thorne's paintings, submerged in an all- embracing space of planes opening on to other planes, all of which seem to crowd forward against the picture-plane, only to be pushed back by the strange free-floating, quasi-geometrical forms that her earlier brushworked blizzards had almost, but never quite, obliterated. In front of these hovering , blind, but animate forms drift myriad shorter, linear brushstrokes like New Years' confetti. Some of these brushstrokes entwine and extend in longer chains that outline yet more shapes, this time ethereally transparent. In the paintings from the beginning of the eighties, which were represented in the 1981 Whitney Biennial, these outlines were broader and more geometrically angled, as evident in paintings represented here such as Iba (1981) and Kabba(1982). The molten energy of these early eighties paintings softens into a carnival atmosphere by 1982-83 as her comparatively hard-edged bands evaporate into their more wraith-like state and the high temperature primary and secondary colors of the background planes are clarified into "solid" shapes themselves.
By the late eighties and early nineties a kind of narrative state, a dream state perhaps, begins to be staged within Thorne's pictorial constructions. The smaller floating shapes were always vaguely alive (I once described them as being awkward, like "newborn animals"1), but now there appear smaller, more representationally suggestive (though still maddeningly elusive) shapes that may have congealed out of the nebulous outlines of the mid-eighties paintings. For once these new shapes appear the floating outlines, for the most part, dry up. These smaller shapes at first resemble measuring, surgical, and navigational instruments: a three-pronged caliper in Dio (1988), a set of blue pincers in Vetulonia (1987), and a braced triangle in Abozone (1988). Later, they morph into more biological and domestic architectural forms which continue to appear in her current paintings: cuttlefish skeletons and undulating rings that could be spinal cross-sections; perspectivally distorted window frames; doors in corridors, and what looks like a hand mirror with a ghostly crown of wavey hair, but could be yet another microscopic water creature.
Even as Thorne's smaller forms grow more evocative, in the early nineties, her background planes become reminiscent of specific places and architectural settings. In paintings from the late eighties through the early to mid-nineties the background planes resemble geological formations such as ravines and rocks. The atmosphere is harsh, often reminiscent of asteroidal outer space, as in D'Arbia (1989), or windswept desert, as in Gorganza(1990). Sometimes the descriptive qualities of the floating forms suggest a spatial reading, as the curving red segmented trumpet in Serpente (1994-5) evokes marine life the background can be seen to describe an undersea cave. Thorne has always been a traveller, but by this point her Mediterranean and Carribean residencies find their way into her work through architectural and landscape signs. A deep, aqueous blue that doubles as a night sky begins to make regular appearance in paintings from 1994 onward. Circular forms also become more pronounced and descriptive, as in the tonally radiant sun-like fan eclipsed by two agate planets in Luna de Jasmine (1998).
Thorne's recent paintings are those of an artist who has been working and expanding her language for a significant amount of time and who is at the peak of her powers. Recalling Cocteau's influence, we can observe that her imaginal world is a Symbolist one, where those recognizable fragments of imagery, so redolent of place and use, are aligned in the para-contexts of dreams and myth. All her compositional elements are mounted and staged in rhythmic relation to each other, swaying to unheard but vivid music and constellating like images from poem stanzas: palms and arched courtyards; warm nights; air and water currents; cliffs and islands; remembered and anticipated sensuality; the edge of threat and the immanent divine (what is that blue wing in Plas de Olimpo (1998)?); all bound together by her belief that painting, in deep dialogue with the art of this past century and the more concrete inspirations of locale and temperament, can and must deliver a constant wild beauty. Hers do.
-Stephen Westfall,
Footnote
Joan Thorne: Mythical Journeys, Power and Flight Robert C. Morgan, 2001
Essay for Retrospective
Museo de Las Americas
Old San Juan, Puerto Rico
2000
New York, 2000
1. "Dance Electric," Art in America, December 1986. Pg. 100.
Joan Thorne a Retrospective Exhibition at Casa de Bastidas, by Richard Vine Art in America, 1998.
Straight Painting, by Robert C. Morgan, essay for the brochure of group exhibition at the PaintingCenter, New York, 2000
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