Joseph Marioni

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Art Now Gallery Guide Northwest

"The work of American Painter Joseph Marioni, a leading figure in the Radical Concrete movement, reveals only the essential qualities of paint and color divesting itself from any unnecessary literal additives such as representation, identifiable composition, or any of the more literary notions such as narrative, irony, metaphor or from political or social statements.

With this in mind, a purely emotional or spiritual inquiry into the work often serves even more intellectually inclined audiences well as they attempt to determine a basis for understanding. Marioni’s paintings may serve as an entry into space or void in which atmospheric gesture however minute draws us into the movement in a single piece. At times, even less obvious elements determine emotive response to these works. Pure color in its most primal expression, or with hints of under-painting peeking through, leaves us with a sense of peace as if we are entering into another –perhaps even spiritual- realm.

Interpreting and understanding monochromatic works often happens when we shed all of our preconceptions and examine the work only for its essential, reductive qualities. Ultimately, then, meaning in the paintings of Joseph Marioni relies on the nuances of the paint itself to stand before its audience as a sight/site for understanding. "

-Wade Wilson,

Art Now Gallery Guide Southwest, November 1999, Cover Feature, 5.

ArtForum

"In all his works of the past two decades we find that same downward flow, not only within the painted fields but also at their limits, toward the edges of the canvas, particularly the bottom and the sides, where drips are allowed to form, lower layers are permitted to show through, and an impersonal but exquisite touch makes itself felt (the effect is not unlike that in certain Chinese and Japanese ceramics). Another feature of his paintings is that the rectangular canvases are ever so slightly narrowed toward the bottom, to match the tendency of the downward-flowing paint to draw in from the sides; in the same spirit, the bottoms of the stretchers are rounded so as to avoid a build-up of paint along the lower edge of the canvas. The result of this highly refined interplay between the physicality of the support and the materiality of the pigment is double: it gives rise to a sense of seamlessness, of aesthetic harmony, that, again, is almost Eastern in its affective resonance; at the same time, the interplay compels a recognition of the separateness of the elements or, say, of the composite nature of the painting as a whole (as in Robert Ryman's paintings but in a wholly different spirit). Some of this can be seen in reproduction, but no illustration can begin to capture the absolute specificity, which in this case also means the transfixing intensity, of the ultimate hue, or the tensile integrity of the paint surface, or the sheer rightness of the color in relation to the size and shape of the support, or the suggestion of depth within or behind the paint surface, an effect that has become increasingly important to his art. "

-Michael Fried,

ArtForum, September 1998