Ron Gorchov

ron gorchov

ron gorchov text by phong bui

cheim & read

Ron Gorchov: Intimate Immensity “I am not concerned that I have no place; I am concerned how I may fit myself for one. I am not concerned that I am known; I seek to be worthy to be known.”i –Confucius, Analects, bk, iv, c. xiv Confucius’s words are a commentary on meekness. Yet, if one imagines these thoughts associated with a particular place and space, many potential meanings emerge and take shape.

I first saw Ron Gorchov’s work in 1990 at Jack Tilton Gallery. I remember being struck by the fact that the painted images—despite the undeniable physical presence of the idiosyncratic saddle stretchers being simultaneously concave and convex––were of a determinedly metaphysical nature. I significantly prolonged my next viewing of his work, and became fascinated by how Gorchov established spatial and pictorial harmony between the twodimensional surfaces with painted images and the three-dimensional structures of the painting objects. I was curious how the two sides of the stretchers were left exposed to show their untreated wood surfaces, which seemed to me, while accentuating the disparity between the painted (unnatural) and the unpainted (natural), to also amplify the precarious relationship between the unstable, delicate surface on top and the solid structure below. Each painting displayed different binaries: pushing and pulling, rejecting and embracing the painted linen surface, which barely stretched across the edges.

I was taken, yet perplexed by these paintings. As I have continued to confront them over the years, they have never ceased to evoke the same feeling. Why am I so compelled by them? Perhaps a better question would be, given their dualistic nature—lightness coupled with weightiness, two-dimensionality with three-dimensionality, painterliness with sculptural form, familiar with unfamiliar, even the past with the present—why have they never once appeared either passive and fatigued or, conversely, aggressive in asserting their unique appearance?

I wish to speak of Gorchov’s attraction to both the language of gesture and language, more conventionally, as words; his titles habitually refer to mythology, religion, history or popular culture: “Adonis” (2011), “Diotima” (2006), “Chevalie d’Eon” (2008), “Noli Me Tangere” (2011), “Chase Street Lounge” (2011) or “Heartbreak Hotel” (2009), among other examples. When asked by an interviewer whether his images might in some ways relate to his mentor and friend John Graham’s landmark depiction of women (and occasionally Graham’s own selfportraits) with crossed eyes and puncture wounds, Gorchov answered, “Graham claimed he was using wounds formally as punctuation, and that the crossed-eyes were a way of trapping space.”ii (See fig. 1.) This response invites two distinct readings. It refers, of course, to the function of language. It also reveals a centralized focus, which is the space being trapped in-between. (With the elimination of ninety-degree corners, which has posed so many pictorial problems in Western painting ever since the invention of portable painting, Gorchov was able to focus solely on the equilibrium of the image and its variation.) Both of these readings are detectable in any of his paintings.

Following the thread of the crossed-eye-space, consider Giotto’s dramatic portrayal of Christ and Judas in “Judas Kissing the Lord,” (see fig. 2) which depicts the poignant, intense confrontation of two dissimilar profiles. Facial perspective—whether profile, full-frontal, or three-quarter—served as an important signifier in medieval art. Profile indicated an asymmetrical, sharplyfeatured face—the face of a flawed being—in contrast to the ideal roundness and symmetry offered by a full-frontal view. The profiled face belongs to a body in action, a body that is lacking, while the full-view face belongs to a figure that is whole and satisfied (see fig. 3). It seems to me that Gorchov has invented a structure that embraces both presentations, yet simultaneously repudiates their legibility.

It’s interesting to note that the art-historical progression of the Fig. 1 John Graham Apothesis 1955-57

three decades during which Gorchov formed, sustained, and gained from his personal experience: the ’50s established the

dominance of New York School painting, the ’60s gave rise to pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art, and by the ’70s, coinciding with post-structuralism and post-minimalism, the preponderance of which marginalized painting, sculpture became the dominant medium. The period from late ’60s to mid ’70s, however, proved unequivocally productive and fruitful to the growth of painting. While many of Gorchov’s peers, including Lynda Benglis, Richard Tuttle, Ralph Humphrey, Mary Heilman, Lee Lozano, and others, were preoccupied with expanding the medium beyond Greenbergian formalism while contending with minimalism’s geometric reduction in both painting and sculpture, Gorchov was able to achieve an unusual degree of pictorial unity. Having invested in John Graham’s notion of modern art as the synthesis of all arts, past and present, and having digested the language of surrealism’s biomorphism and the geometric reduction of minimalism, Gorchov deferred to the language of gestures that were once elemental and essential to the painted image. Like the medieval frontal face, Gorchov’s repertoire of images is legible and loaded with innumerable associations and implications. They never lose their initial primitiveness, perhaps because, as Gaston Bachalard observed, “An image that is worked over loses its initial virtues.”iii

Fig.2 Giotto (Detail) Judas Kissing the Lord Arena Chapel

“Noli Me Tangere”—both the image and its title, which translates to “Touch Me Not”—recalls the complex relationship between Mary Magdalene and Christ. The legendary encounter of the risen but not yet ascended Christ’s encounter with Mary Magdalene has famously been painted by Giotto, Fra Angelico, Titian, Correggio, Caravaggio, and many other Renaissance and baroque masters.

Various interpretations of Mary Magdalene, one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages—whose image educes sinfulness as readily as it does devotion to Christ—are offered in Scripture. The Gospel of Matthew’s version tells of how Christ, after Fig. 2 Noli Me Tangere, Basilique Saint-Andoche, Saulieu

his resurrection, appears to Mary Magdalene and another Mary—assumed by most scholars to be Mary

of Nazareth—and greets them with the traditional “All Hail,” upon which the women take hold of his feet and worship him (28:9). The Gospel of John offers an enigmatic variant in which a weeping “Mary”—not precisely identified as Mary Magdalene until later in the passage—peers into the tomb of the recently slain Christ, only to find two angels; she tells them she weeps because she does not know where they have put her Lord. She then turns around to find herself face to face with the resurrected Christ, although she does not recognize him until he speaks her name, at which point he tells her: “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my father” (20:17).iv Whichever version of this encounter artists choose to represent, the moment is always charged with emotional tension between Christ and Mary Magdalene. Gorchov’s version, however, evokes a memory image rather than abstracting from or literally depicting the events as described in text. This so-called “memory image,” I suspect, is most readily attained when, as Bachelard has said, “the mind sees and continues to see objects, while the spirit finds the rest of immensity in an object.”v Gorchov has said that his paintings are “almost made from reverie and luck,” which is to say they belong to the philosophical category of daydream.vi Daydream, or shall we say the state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts, is a described condition of reverie. Reverie, intimate immensity, which can only occur when one is motionless, in a state of complete silence, is the still condition before ascent.

The thin, overlapping layers of reddish brown paint in “Noli Me Tangere” peer beneath a veil of cobalt blue, painted in irregular, thin patches and dripped and rubbed areas, which generate a field that essentially pushes the negative space inward to create the two forms, which mirror each others’ vertical presence. They are set below the central axis of the canvas. The image as a whole evokes the erotic—Mary Magdalene’s sensual love for Christ—and the carnal—the two wounds on his feet, which she held in her hands. Like his other paintings, it has a quality that is at the same time extraordinary and utterly commonplace. “Chase Street Lounge,” named after a local jazz lounge at the border of Chicago and Evanston where Gorchov worked as an in-house artist

when he was 18, shares this quality of the remarkable yet everyday. At the lounge he used to make caricatures of the regulars on sheets of paper placed above a projector so that the projected screen revealed the movement of his hand and the process of the drawing from start to finish. It was some sort of performance, and Gorchov happily made five bucks per drawing. The sentiment of “Chase Street Lounge,” unlike “Noli Me Tangere,” is squarely within the domain of pop culture. It has snap. The dissimilar pairing of the two red forms is severely pronounced; the left one resembles a bowling pin, the right, a large, kidney-like form. The forms’ edges are sharp and their surfaces flat. While they appear to be more or less in the center of the vertical field, they are in fact painted off of the center, creating a sense of movement, moving to the left horizontally. The forms seem to be in transit, quite unlike to the static shimmering in “Noli Me Tangere.” There is a definite sense of gaiety, of festivity, which expresses the multipliable variations between Gorchov’s words and memory images: his repertoire is impressive. “Chase Street Lounge” is a Proustian reverie, as Proust himself would have relished living vicariously through Chardin, whose still lifes revealed harmony and quiet beauty in the most everyday of objects. Perhaps this is a condition of topophilia.

Each of Gorchov’s paintings, to begin with, requires the structure provided by the stretchers, which in turn requires a new conception of the dynamics of the painted image. The result: a hard-won harmonious spatial condition. Each image appears to be in spatial harmony with its restricted field and structure, and yet Gorchov has never been interested in allowing the image to accumulate or gets built up with extraneous amount of paint.

He resolutely favors the slow and gradual application of thin layers until the image begins to invoke that feeling of reverie over labor. One suspects that he approaches each painting differently each time. “This is what exactly Ron Gorchov’s paintings do,” Robert Storr observed, “and do consistently in different proportions—near square but never square to near oval but never oval to near rectangular but never rectangular and all always bowed— and in different sizes—very small to very big—and in different orientations—vertical and horizontal.”vii In addition to meddling—subtly or overtly—with the grid and loosening the boundaries of the forms, which springs from his previous experience as a gestural painter and his self-imposed minimalist constraints, Gorchov is able to endow each painting with a different process that unifies them with their preexisting structures. This may require many sessions of painting and repainting (in many cases after he applies an initial layer of paint, he strips or scrapes it back down to the essential white ground) or hours of staring at a blank canvas (perhaps in a perfect state of reverie) before putting down the first stroke. That stroke may be a matter of luck, or a result of an obstinate process of revision. Nevertheless, it’s precisely through this diligent maintenance of such an unpredictable and treacherous balance that Gorchov heightens his ability to broaden his variations of intimate immensity.

Bachelard, in his chapter on miniature in The Poetics of Space, admits that he is “caught up in the perplexing dialectics of deep and large, of the infinitely diminished that deepens, or the large that extends beyond all limits.”viii Fitting in is neither a matter of jettisoning expectations of how a place or space should be ideally, nor of calculating how one may be most securely located within a given space. Actually, fitting in means not fitting in, or more explicitly, not even thinking about not fitting in. David Levi Strauss, observing Gorchov’s structure (the given space) and the painted image (yet to be determined), wrote, “Their force ultimately derives from

what is not there.”ix On one hand one senses that the whole history of art is the history of a non-linear, timeless organism, which permits any one of us to correspond with any work of art from the distant or recent past. Yet, on the other hand, the desire to be relevant to one’s time is important to any ambitious artist. Gorchov’s dialectics have allowed him to take his time, knowing they would feed his work for a lifetime, and guide him to trust his inner ambition and fulfillment over external expectation and novelty. Logical argumentation proves to be barren without his imagination. And imagination, every time Gorchov confronts a new painting, “is like a drunk man who lost his watch,” and “must get drunk again to find it.”x Phong Bui 2012

i

Menander Dawson, Miles, LL.D., ed. The Wisdom of Confucius, A Collection of The Ethical Sayings of Confucius and His Disciples, (Boston, International Pocket Library, 1932), p. 29

ii

”Ron Gorchov In Conversation with Robert Storr and Phong Bui,” (The Brooklyn Rail, September, 2006), p. 24 – 26

iii

Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994, chapter 10 The Phenomenology of Roundness), p. 235

iv

Holy Bible. King James Bible (Cambridge Edition)

v

Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994, chapter 8 Intimate Immensity), p. 190

vi

“Ron Gorchov In Conversation with Robert Storr and Phong Bui” (The Brooklyn Rail, September, 2006), p. 24 – 26

vii

Storr, Robert, “Old Master Ron” (catalogue published by Nicholas Robinson Gallery in collaboration with Vito Schnabel, 2008), p. 4

viii

Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994, chapter 7 Miniature), p. 180

ix

Bui, Phong, Robert Storr, David Levi Strauss, and John Yau, eds. On Ron Gorchov. (The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions, 2008), p. 32

x

Davenport, Guy, The Geography of Imagination (Beacon Press, 1981), p. 5

Hypatia 2009 oil on linen 26 x 19 x 5 1/2 in 66 x 48.3 x 14 cm

Diana 2010 oil on linen 25 x 23 x 7 in 63.5 x 58.4 x 17.8 cm

Artemisia 2011 oil on linen 43 1/2 x 36 x 8 1/2 in 110.5 x 91.4 x 21.6 cm

Chase Street Lounge 2011 oil on linen 43 x 36 x 9 1/4 in 109.2 x 91.4 x 23.5 cm

Noli Me Tangere 2011 oil on linen 44 1/2 x 36 x 10 in 113 x 91.4 x 25.4 cm

Thersites (Chastened) 2012 oil on linen 34 3/4 x 42 1/4 x 8 3/4 in 88.3 x 107.3 x 22.2 cm

Diana 2012 oil on linen 42 x 36 x 8 1/2 in 106.7 x 91.4 x 21.6 cm

Erato 2012 oil on linen 42 x 36 x 8 1/2 in 106.7 x 91.4 x 21.6 cm

Adonis (Spring) 2012 oil on linen 41 1/2 x 36 x 8 1/2 in 105.4 x 91.4 x 21.6 cm

Zephyros 2012 oil on linen 35 x 45 x 8 3/4 in 88.9 x 114.3 x 22.2 cm

Eurydice 2012 oil on linen 44 x 36 x 8 1/2 in 111.8 x 91.4 x 21.6 cm

La Piva 2012 oil on linen 35 x 45 x 9 in 88.9 x 114.3 x 22.9 cm

BIOGRAPHY Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1930; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York EDUCATION 1947-48 University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS 1948-50 Roosevelt College & Art Institute, Chicago, IL 1950-51 University of Illinois, Urbana, IL SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2012

Cheim & Read, New York

2011 Ron Gorchov, Donde Se Oculta el Alma, Centro Atlรกntico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain 2010 George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2009 NY Masters: Alain Kirili & Ron Gorchov, Galerie Richard, Paris 2008 Recent Paintings, Nicholas Robinson Gallery, New York 2006 Double Trouble, P.S. 1, Long Island City, NY 2005 Vito Schnabel, Hudson Street, New York 1994 Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, MI 1993 Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 1992 Jack Tilton Gallery, New York 1990 Jack Tilton Gallery, New York 1985 Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, MI 1984 Benjamin Mangel Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 1983 Marlborough Gallery, New York 1981 Montana State University Fine Arts Gallery, Bozeman, MT 1980

Gallery AK, Frankfurt, Germany

Hamilton Gallery, New York

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

1979 Hamilton Gallery, New York

Young Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL

Entrance, P.S. 1, Long Island City, NY

1978

Galerie M, Bochum, Germany

Matrix Program, University Art Museum, Berkley, CA

1977

Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, MI

1976

Rooms, P.S. 1, Long Island City, NY

Texas Gallery, Houston, TX

1975 Fischbach Gallery, New York 1972 Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY 1966 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York 1963 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York 1960 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION 2012

Little Languages/Coded Pictures, Lesley Heller Workspace, New York

Brucennial, New York

2011

Paper 2011, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, New York

It’s All Good!! Apocalypse Now, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Brooklyn Rail 10 Year Anniversary Silent Art Benefit Auction, Visual Arts Gallery, School of Visual Arts, New York

2010 Between Picture and Viewer: The Image in Contemporary Painting, Visual Arts Gallery, School of Visual Arts, New York

Works On Paper, Galerie Richard, Paris, France

Territories, Left of Center, Curated by Jeffrey Uslip, The Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, CA

Party at Chris’s House, Curated by Phong Bui, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2009

Triple Play, Curated by Lilly Wei, Lesley Heller Gallery, New York

NY Masters: Bleckner, Gorchov, Kirili, Koznowski, Ross, Stella, Galerie Richard, Paris

Winter Salon: Works on Paper, Bjorn Ressle Gallery, New York

2008

Party at Phong’s, Curated by Chris Martin, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Curated by Ben La Rocco, Brooklyn, NY

Bruce High Quality Group Show, Brooklyn, NY

2006

New Painting, Suzanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, MI

1997

Roland Pease Collection, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

Salient Green, Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, MI

1996

Epitaphs, Invitational Exhibition, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York

1995

47th Annual Purchase Exhibition, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York

1993

30th Anniversary Exhibition (Benefit, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts),

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

Paintings from the Permanent Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Return of the Cadavre Exquis, The Drawing Center, New York

Paintings from the Permanent Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO

MFA Gallery, Hunter College, New York

1993

Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, MI

1992

Invitational, Curated by Marjory Wellish, John Good Gallery, New York

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, MI

1991

Abstract Painting of the 90’s, Curated by Barbara Rose, Andre Emerich Gallery, New York

1990

Clyfford Still: A Dialogue, Philippe Briet Gallery, New York

1989

Jack Tilton Gallery, New York

Small and Stellar, Ruth Seigel Gallery, New York

Urrealism, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Curated by Alan Jones, New York

1986 Inspiration by Nature, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York 1985

Gallery Artists, Marlborough Gallery, New York

Abstract Painting, 1960-1980, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1984

Eccentric Images, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1983

Language, Drama, Source and Vision, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

Bonnier Gallery, New York

1981

Hamilton Gallery, New York

HONORS & AWARD 2010

Skowhegan Medal for Painting

2010

Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant

1994

John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Painting

1975

National Endowment for the Arts Award for Painting

1975

CAPS Award

1959

Ingram Merrill Award

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTION Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY Guggenheim Museum, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Museum of Modern Art, New York The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO The Detroit Art Museum, Detroit, MI The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

ron gorchov text by phong bui designed by john cheim cheim & read, new york

printed in an edition of 1,500 on the occasion of the 2012 exhibition printed in the united states by ghp media photography by brian buckley

isbn 978-0-9851410-1-1

cheim & read new york