Contributed by Vittorio Colaizzi / Some painters insist on calling themselves painters rather than artists, and it’s clear why. “Art” designates is a broad category that admits almost anything, while painting is a tradition centered on a medium. In his recent book, Duchamp’s Telegram, Thierry de Duve argues that, while Marcel Duchamp did not single-handedly invent art in general, he perceived and announced its arrival. Before that, art was inconceivable outside the context of specific media such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. Duchamp’s insight, of course, did not spell the end of painting, Rather, it gave painters the option of retreating into self-sustaining insularity or more expansively embracing how painting and other art overlapped in terms of image, touch, plane, color, space, and voice. Joan Thorne, whose recent paintings are now on view at David Richard Gallery, has taken the latter course, to impressive effect.
An extraordinary thing about Thorne’s paintings is that they reveal no pentimenti. There are painters who seem to premise their work on little else. But Thorne’s surfaces consist of decisive patterns of varying colors and mark, either corralled into zones or opening out across a comparatively vast surface. Her confident execution is anything but rote or dry. Indeed, it can seem frenetic and traditionally expressionist until the viewer again stops to appreciate the deliberation with which all the elements are arranged.
Thorne has been painting since the late 1960s, and, after an early foray into the staining technique that earned her a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in 1973, she established an enduring vocabulary of gesture and geometry when many other painters were appropriating Minimalism’s pragmatism as to materials while chaffing at its restrictions. Thorne similarly embraced a near-performative mode, with thick, knife-riven furrows leading towards but just shy of the canvas edge. Over the years, she seems to have mellowed, losing none of her intensity of feeling but turning inward, the high impasto giving way to saturated and layered vistas.
Her most recent paintings, such as Chitara and Miracle (both made this year),are notably insistent in their frontality. The former lines up roughly vertical but irregular swaths of actively brushed areas reveal endless surprise and interest around their borders, while the latter presents a dramatic contrast between flattened, undulating, and multidirectional peripheral zones and a deep chasm in that eccentric central shape. Freedom and abandon in terms of color is pervasive, as she alternately uses esoteric neutrals and tertiaries and, to evoke conceptualism, blazing primaries.
To picture something, even a geometric shape, in an imaginary space was heresy to high modernist purists because it undermined the full actuality of object, place, and process. While the art world is richer for the relaxation of these precepts, Thorne highlights the hope and belief that lay behind them by placing them side-by-side with their opposite. In Orango, a row of concentric green arcs – complicated by her signature trembling – frames a riotous zone of magenta, cobalt, and powdery violet. Only after some deciphering does the sequence and nature of layers become apparent, as the literal and the illusionistic interpenetrate. In this painting and others, the brushstroke, inherently metaphorical and culturally loaded, operates in the tactile space of the painting’s construction.
The difference between these paintings’ integration of the real and the pictorial, and the activity in physical and discursive space of art in general, is only a matter of degree and scale. Thorne’s work, to be sure, is unabashedly and joyfully painting. Yet it celebrates elements of touch and saturation, among others, that tantalize and fascinate viewers, and, moreover, open portals into wider human concerns about desire, patience, concentration, and commitment. Clearly Thorne’s paintings also operate as art in general, holding their own against the readymade or the specific object – not as polarizing advocacy for painting but as a generous gift of shared experience.
“Joan Thorne, An Odyssey of Color,” David Richard Gallery, 508 West 26th Street, Suite 9E, New York, NY. Through April 18, 2024.
About the author: Vittorio Colaizzi is a painter and art historian, with published pieces in Woman’s Art Journal, the Smithsonian’s American Art, and the Journal of the Association for Study of Art of the Present. In 2009, he co-edited with Karsten Schubert an anthology of critical writings on Robert Ryman. In 2017, he compiled a Robert Ryman monograph, published by Phaidon. Dr. Colaizzi is an associate professor of art history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, and has curated exhibitions in New York, Minnesota, and Virginia.
