tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8694556.post115791324459644106..comments2023-11-05T07:44:36.996-05:00Comments on anaba: Ron JohnsonMartinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13383812070175961882noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8694556.post-1159390318298571042006-09-27T16:51:00.000-04:002006-09-27T16:51:00.000-04:00yes.. i like them! most of them.. i don't like his...yes.. i like them! most of them.. i don't like his work with the horizontal bands, not pictured here.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8694556.post-1159384455323712452006-09-27T15:14:00.000-04:002006-09-27T15:14:00.000-04:00i dont know why my login name on my work computer ...i dont know why my login name on my work computer showed up in my above post.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8694556.post-1159384320416581282006-09-27T15:12:00.000-04:002006-09-27T15:12:00.000-04:00I could just be projecting my own obsessions, but ...I could just be projecting my own obsessions, but it seems to me that the issue here is between "motivation" as a modernist project and painters' joyful emancipation from it. I use motivation in the sense used by Yve-Alain Bois in his work on Ellsworth Kelly and others, in which he describes the need to make painting somehow responsive to its physical constituents. Objective, reliable, finite, rather than frivolous and subjective. Think Stella's Black Paintings.<BR/><BR/>So Ron's paintings seem to be made with a dim memory of that project, as if filtered through digital projections in art history classes, but without a sense of the progammatic: no sense of obligation to be true to anything, but rather a joy in the evocative possibilities of transparency, faux-automatic markmaking, and uncontrolled flow of paint.<BR/><BR/>Almost uncontrolled flow of paint, because it is conditioned, or, yes, motivated by those perpendicular pieces of canvas, which are in turn literalizations of the material of painting (canvas) shredded and turned on its ear. And the pencil marks on the mylar that imitate the canvas loops are an art-historically backwards de-literaliztion of the project of modernism: they are contrarian within that framework because a good modernist is supposed to go from virtual to real, but Ron goes the other way. Of course, virtuality is apt today.<BR/>Ron plays, within a well-defined vocabulary.<BR/><BR/>And we are left with the question: Do we like them?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com