KAREN WILKIN
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troubled painters survives. I don't mean in Ross Bleckner's recent perfor–
mances on the airbrush, seen simul taneously at Mary Boone,
Lehmann-Maupin, and in Absol ut ads; they could be described as rooted
in both Pollock's idea of the all-over picture and Rothko's desire for
ambiguous luminosity, but that would dignifY vapid slickness with a dis–
tinguished pedigree. I mean Louise Fishman's and Joseph Marioni's fall
exhibitions of paintings that affirmed the persistence of a belief in the
potency of touch, the expressiveness of paint itself, the preeminence of the
visual over the verbal.
Fishman's show at Cheim and Read was perhaps her strongest to date.
Her earlier densely woven (sometimes literally) pictures have become loos–
er, more sensuous, and tougher. Her recent paintings seem to evolve as you
watch, through surfaces that range from transparent scrapes to fluid callig–
raphy. At once evocative and uncompromisingly about a particular
individual's touch, these paintings appear to dissect what it means to make
a non-referential picture through the act of making one.
Nothing is quite what it seems. Color appears murky and deep even
when it is relatively clear and bright. You become intensely aware of
process-loading, scraping, overlaying, excavating-at the same time that
you become increasingly conscious of the density, instability, and individ–
uality of the accumulated marks. Soft "blots" cancel dense ploughings;
elegant swoops swim up through broad swipes; strokes fray and tatter to
reveal underlying layers. There's an obsessive side to these brooding pic–
tures, but nothing formulaic; each has a distinct mood, personality, and
physical character.
It
was an absorbing, impressive show.
Joseph Marioni's mysterious, monochrome pictures, shown at Peter
Blum, were new to me, despite his distinguished exhibition history, par–
ticularly in Europe.
(I
am indebted to the former director of the Rose Art
Museum, Carl Belz, for correcting my ignorance.) Marioni's profound
concern wi th particular expanses of particular densi ties of particular colors
results in confrontational but insubstantial cascades of relentless, saturated
single hues, impossibly slowed in their descent. You read across and into
the sheets of color, but you can't quite trust your perceptions, since the
subtle inflections created by repeated thin applications of paint disappear
when you come close, leaving only the brute fact of-paradoxically–
translucent pigment on a surface.
In
your effort to understand what you are
seeing, you seize on the smallest rivulet, the least waver in density. The
sense of layering and of the glacial descent of a liquid mass of paint, in fact,
is implied chiefly by the way color frays and puddles at the bottom (or,
more rarely, the sides) of the canvas.
Despite their literal thinness, Marioni's most arresting pictures appear,
as a painter friend noted, to be "fat," that is, to be about the material presence
