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Where most artists navigate a mature career by uncomfortably modifying what’s best about their work in order to stay current or hip, few maintain the nuance, authority and creative curiosity that makes a difference. As an example of the latter, this conclusion is what one comes away with after seeing Otis Jones’ latest work at Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas, Texas. In these newest pieces, all executed in 2006, Jones has continued his personal investigation of abstraction as expressed in painted surfaces, of alternating media and texture on shaped canvases that range from squares and circles to anti-geometrical non-shapes. |
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Circles, Squares, Objects? – John Zotos
Where most artists navigate a mature career by uncomfortably modifying what’s best about their work in order to stay current or hip, few maintain the nuance, authority and creative curiosity that makes a difference. As an example of the latter, this conclusion is what one comes away with after seeing Otis Jones’ latest work at Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas, Texas.
In these newest pieces, all executed in 2006, Jones has continued his personal investigation of abstraction as expressed in painted surfaces, of alternating media and texture on shaped canvases that range from squares and circles to anti-geometrical non-shapes. The work exhibits Jones’ constant attention to the theme of process, as he spends the majority of his time burnishing, scratching or polishing his surfaces before stopping at the right moment.
This suggests one way of entering the work as a viewer. Paintings alternate in hue and texture, ranging from flat to a polished gloss or a pitted topography. In his intense process of building up the surface media and alternately sanding it away or cutting into the material, Jones foregrounds the status of his paintings as objects. Objects not merely painted, as the sacred surface of modernist gesture or geometric fields via Greenberg, but rather coated or veneered. These notions of veneering and object-hood, by way of Michael Fried in his famous essay, clearly summon stylistic descriptions and comparisons to minimalism, while reading Jones’ work as problem making differences between painting and sculpture.
For Jones, minimalism operates as a place from which to begin to say more visually by stripping away decoration or standard formalist ideas about presentation. More importantly, it references his insistence, thematically, to produce work that blurs high and low distinctions, in the hopes that his work can take on meaning for a viewer provided they take the time to stop and actually contemplate his work. As such, the work privileges not only the viewer’s phenomenal experience but the artist’s experience of conception and execution, something anathema to devout minimalists, who strive to remove the artist’s gesture or the handmade quality of art.
In Red Oxide Circle a large irregularly shaped canvas challenges the viewer to accept the fact that the shape of the painting can be anything the artist chooses. Jones debunks aesthetic baggage stemming from the centuries old debate about painting as either a window onto the world or a mirror-like reflection of it. This is neither. As an object the painting presents itself as an abstraction that draws attention to the fact of its making by, for instance, showing staple supports that hold the canvas onto the frame. This device repeats itself throughout the show as a constant reminder that Jones incorporates materials common to everyday life, linking the art to the viewer.
In this imposing painting, placed as the centerpiece to the quasi U-shaped space occupied by the show, Jones applied the red oxide just short of the perimeter of the canvas, revealing the raw material and staples that curve around the edge of the frame. The juxtaposition of the side profile, with unpainted canvas, staples and red oxide, allow the piece to morph into several different things at once, depending where you look and how you feel when you approach it.
In Small Yellow Circle a smooth yellow gloss fills the surface of a veritable circle flowing over the edges, while the unpainted canvas and staples extend only half way to the back edge revealing the wooden frame support. This purposeful device not only adds a natural element to the materials that comprise the work, it also enriches the visual experience. The wood, in particular the lines of the grain, open several possibilities for references to objects in wooden design, furniture or even architecture. Jones stresses that the painting may be as, or even more, interesting as a whole than in an isolated single perspective.
Jones’ work posits an attitude about experience and living. Through the metaphor of art as the act of both creating and looking, he brings these seemingly isolated notions together. Time and duration, necessary preconditions to the visual experience, form a link to the creative process thereby, short-circuiting the “flavor of the day” and “short fix” aesthetics that contaminate contemporary art today.
