JACK PIERSON
onthisisland CHEIM & READ
JACK PIERSON
onthisisland CHEIM & READ
ECHO PAINTING by JAN AVGIKOS Abstract painting, just as it ever has, is branching out in all directions, inviting multiplicities of uses, appropriations and graftings. Today we know abstraction as a dynamic process, seductively open and rhizomatic, capable of questioning traditional distinctions between concept and sensibility, the abstract and the concrete. Abstract painting proves increasingly useful because it is never “resolved.” If we describe the inner project of art as analogous to an inner quest for style, for a way of being in the world, then its potential to draw on the richness of experience is equally inexhaustible. This explains, in part, why Jack Pierson has always been an abstract artist. That is where his art is rooted, no matter the medium. He uses the abstract as content. Often amplified with emotional resonance, it amounts to a kind of exposure of inward complexities. It might appear to many that Jack Pierson has taken a proverbial “leap into the void” in his unmitigated embrace of abstract painting: not machine-printed, not silk-screened, not photo-based, but genuine gestural made-by-hand—his hand— abstraction. A suite of more than 300 liquid graphite and watercolor abstract paintings on paper, almost 200 of which are arranged in ten groups for presentation—as well as a series of 12 small oil/wax/sand paintings on canvas—would appear to be unprecedented in his practice. JP himself refers to this concentration of abstract painting as “a return to the hand.” Those who have followed his work since the early ‘90s, when he first arrived and began to show in NYC, know that a “return to the hand” is an episodic event in JP’s art.
Drawing has always been prominent in JP’s practice. His first solo exhibitions in NYC—Simon Watson Gallery, 1990; Pat Hearn, 1991; Tom Cugliani, 1992—featured drawings that were a powerful testament to emotive depths. Line drawings of hands—his hands, gesticulating, smoking, grappling, cramping, drawing—could be read as a sign language exploring a welter of psychological states but also as evidence of sustained close observation. There was a sense of making something out of nothing, but what was really mesmerizing was the quality of his line. That was the thing. You could see how hard he pressed into the paper. You could follow the fragmentary, jerky crudeness of his line that always found its mark, taking measure of the most mundane things in the world, the stuff you see every day and look right through. Those drawings impressed with their palpable immediacy and poignancy, but it was painting that carried the day into the big breakthrough exhibition at Luhring Augustine gallery in 1994. When JP got his bump-up from the small startup galleries on the fringes of Soho to Luhring Augustine, located in those days on the second floor of the “Bakery Building” on the corner of Wooster and Prince, he brought together what would become enduring elements in his art. Signage works, photographs, and installation elements spoke in very personal terms about life and working in the studio. The exhibition also included a series of abstract paintings produced with oil and wax on canvas that were relentlessly reductive. In them, JP’s characteristic scrawny lines, fattened up with oil and wax, are laid down as clipped linear segments that march across the canvas, filling up one register and then another
and another with rows of staccato marks. He had produced minimally-inclined paintings since at least 1992, on paper (with oil sticks) and on canvas, all of which consisted of digital units, about the measure of a finger, loosely organized and repeated to infinity. Do those marks constitute a secret code language? An attempt to account for the passage of time? A means to possess the moment? Probably so. Significantly, the paintings were all blue—crisp nautical blue, like the color of the sky over the ocean. Lingering in the plentitude of that most outrageously attractive shade of big bright blue, you felt he had tapped into something very expansive. Relying exclusively on line as a carrier of expressive energy but never exhausting its potential, these early abstract paintings are practically idyllic. Triggered with every blue mark on the surface, those canvases might as well have read “days spent in paradise.” Such ideas are so internalized in JP’s art they are a given—but where there has been pleasure there has also been ferocious undertow. Back in the ‘90s, the color blue might describe bliss, but it was also about lover boy blues, romantic longing and loss. It was about as loaded a color as you could find. It ushered in a celebration of all things gay and at the same time undertook the task of mourning. To remember those abstract paintings from the early ‘90s (to bring them back into play) is to realize that for JP painting and drawing have always been intrinsically related. The line can be fat, dry and matter-of-fact; and it can also swell into liquidity. Where is the boundary between what we call drawing and painting? In JP’s art, it’s always negotiable. While drawing
has been given free reign in his practice, painting has been subjected to many “operations” and more or less “closeted.” More than 20 years have passed since the blue encaustic paintings were produced—that was the last time JP used oil and wax on canvas. Now, with the series of 12 small oil/wax/ sand paintings included in “onthisisland,” foregrounded by the liquid graphite and watercolor paintings, there’s a suggestion of coming full circle. Here’s the way Jack described what precipitated “onthisisland.” The plan was to take a bare minimum of materials—just a stack of paper (11x14, the size he’s comfortable with), graphite sticks and liquid graphite, watercolors and brushes—and to head for the shore for the winter months. (Other materials—the stretched canvases, the oils and wax—came later.) His destination was North Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico off the Southwest coast of Florida. With none of the usual distractions—no companions, no stimulants, but, we presume, the Chihuahua—he went to work in splendid isolation. North Captiva Island isn’t connected to the mainland or to the larger Captiva or Sanibel Islands in its chain. Small by any standard, the island is approximately 4½ miles long and a half mile across at its widest. Vehicles are not permitted and development is very limited. Half the island is a preserve (over 350 acres) and we can imagine, even if it is romantic to do so, that it bears some degree of resemblance to the natural environment the Calusa Indians lived in for almost 2,000 years (before their massacre by the Spanish conquistadors).
The website says there are no worries, no problems on North Captiva Island and promises that its treasured resources are “beyond your imagination.” With all of its luscious and protected abundance, privacy is guaranteed. The paintings on paper came first. Produced over the course of the three-month winter residency, they were experimental and developed through discovery rather than according to predetermined ideas. Liquid graphite and watercolor, worked together, are highly complimentary and produce stunning visual effects. Graphite offers so much range, whether thinned to the lightest pearly sheens or concentrated in dark luminous intensities. JP used it to tamp down the brightness of the watercolors—which he limited to one or two colors per group of paintings—bringing the palette in line with the subdued colors of a Southern Florida winterscape. Washes, splashes, blurs, puffs, veils, shrouds, scribbles, traces—a wealth of fluid gestures and brushwork conjures atmospheric qualities ranging from calm to turbulent and back again. It’s these “field effects” that draw us into the drama of production and prompt us to read into the paintings—in a sense, to narrate them. The more you look, the more you see. Depending on how they are arranged, the paintings can tell innumerable “stories” about the sustained project and place of their invention. Ranging from dry to liquid as they went down on the paper, linear elements emerged in morphological groups. A partial inventory includes bold calligraphic marks, shapes with botanical and figural possibilities, loopy lines, patterns, spirals, bubbles, stenciled parts, pendant-like silhouettes,
chandelier forms, and more. At once, we recognize the qualities of that pulsating jerky line that’s been there from the get-go in JP’s art. It’s his hand all right but here, liberated from representational duty, the line has become protean, maybe even “gone wild,” nimbly and constantly reinventing itself in what looks like a sustained Dionysian event. Many of the small paintings hint at potential legibility, as if on the verge of coalescing into “something” recognizable at any second (and some do). With so many forms poised in a flux of becoming, sped on by the momentum of sweeping brush work, rushing parts, folding forms, and other eventful actions, the suite of hundreds of paintings is quite animated. As we peer into the evanescence of the silvery graphite forms and gestures intermingled with coloristic effects, looking to see what we see, engaged with putting things together for ourselves in these paintings, it becomes evident that at such moments we experience a kind of anticipation, as though watching the paintings’ abstract elements “develop” before our very eyes; in effect, the sensation is like being in a darkroom, observing a photographic image as it comes into view. The “echo effect” with photography is interesting because painting and photography often run on the same tracks in JP’s art. His graphite and watercolor paintings are as indelibly linked to place and time (though by different means) as were some of the earliest “on location” photographs—the “sun pictures” by Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes of seaweed and algae. Neither used paper negatives but captured shadow imagery from objects placed directly on light-sensitive
paper. The resultant images displayed a fidelity to nature and, simultaneously, a distance from observed reality. Those qualities, specifically, manifest in JP’s “onthisisland.” There’s something about confronting the sheer volume of work that’s tantamount to a release. To enter imaginatively into its durational aspects produces an effect akin to temporal suspension. That’s when the environmental impact built into the paintings is most pronounced. There are many exquisitely beautiful individual paintings and sequences in the hundreds of graphite and watercolor paintings. The sheer volume of work is not progressive. Its modularity undermines any hierarchy and attests to the importance of the continuousness of JP’s painting project, rather than the critical process of editing. Durational aspects are pronounced, and the imprint of time is evident. The paintings changed from day to day, from week to week, from month to month. Painting was as much a means to engage with being away on the island as were the new daily routines: beachcombing, hauling back precious harvests of shells and barnacle-studded driftwood, making collections of the best walking sticks (some of which were destined to show up in the gallery installation, bringing Robert Smithson’s ideas about “site” and “non-site” readily to mind). It’s easy to imaginatively associate with the ambience of beach life—sun, sand, seaweed, shells, seagulls, stars—and the ideal of a pristine natural environment. Time stands still. What constitutes full immersion? Call it romantic and you would be right. JP’s art has always been full of yearning and aspiration. The other day he emailed me a page from his copy
of Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature.” It’s all marked up with JP’s circling and underlining of the most relevant passages— indications that Emerson’s thoughts on art and transcendence are absolutely fundamental for JP. Channeling these ideas in a text he wrote for Artforum in 2013, JP wrote that “Art is supposed to endure, to be ultimately immortal . . .for me to paint is to grab at eternity.” Well into his residency on the island, toward the end of the retreat, JP made a series of oil/wax/sand paintings on canvas. The DNA of the island is encoded in the textured encaustic paintings. It’s Captiva sand. The paintings were made outof-doors, so we can imagine the sand got there all by itself. In “Nature” Emerson wrote (and JP circled it) that “a work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world.” The souvenir sand makes that point in a very direct and elemental way. In other respects, the paintings reflect island influences with greater degrees of nuance: in onomatopoetic paired forms, in wave-line patterns, in juicy fruit colors, in the suggestion of vast space. The twelve small encaustic paintings don’t look like anything JP has ever produced. The paintings are dreamy with soft forms that hug each other and flow together, internalized and quiet. We readily see in them echoes of forms, gestures and compositions that materialized in the hundreds of graphite and watercolor paintings that immediately preceded them. In the oil works, the speed and volatility of the graphite and watercolor paintings is slowed down. Indeed, the wax and sand additives limit fluidity and bring the movement of the action paintings to a virtual standstill. Intuitively, we see JP
tapping into forms that surrender themselves only under close scrutiny. It’s what we’ve come to expect from him—his sensitive and sustained powers of observation. In a cultural sense, that’s something that’s touted as lost in today’s fast-paced world. “onthisisland” pushes back against that conditioning, with paintings that manifest a desire to be “fully in the world.” What’s more, we can imagine that the paintings evince not only the pursuit of a “formless quality of nature” (quoting from one of JP’s notes in the margin of Emerson’s “Nature”) but are evidence of a kind of wilding, as though observed by a “wild eye” or felt by a “wild heart.” The paintings of “onthisisland” have everything to do with indulging as deeply as possible (a kind of entering into, or becoming one with) the natural beauty of the island and the magic of the Gulf. To return to the hand, to work spontaneously and intuitively, to embrace traditional painting flat out, to not fully know where it would lead, to risk failure, to elude oneself, to feel as if you’ve found yourself, to experience doubt—it’s a docket of the creative process. JP has always presented a penchant for the prize that’s just out of reach and for revealing himself in that pursuit. The “toothiness” of life has been a source of romantic intensity throughout his practice. That’s been the conduit for enflamed desire, for melancholy and angst, but those emotions are in short supply in “onthisisland.” Temperamentally, it’s a sea-change. The demeanor of the small, intimate oil paintings is a big departure from the large-format “paintings” JP has produced between 1997 and 2002—large, mechanically produced,
abstracted from photographic and video details, some looking quite mesmerizing or illegible, others retaining narrative links to homo-erotic pleasures, or commenting on our increasingly fluid cultures and the world at large. Other indicators—the big signage work entitled “Abstract Painting,” 2007, and related abstracted text pieces—suggest JP has been circling abstraction for some time. But his move to painting with a capital “P” has an apparently willful side to it. He embraces “action painting,” albeit in watercolors and small oil canvases; he cranks up painting’s emotional valences and expressive potential; he valorizes the hand; he goes full-out in pursuit of beauty. From a critical perspective, JP’s maneuvers are tantamount to breaking all the rules of contemporary painting at once. (Let’s count that as a success!) They are not “defensible,” but they are certainly delectable and therein lies their valor. For Emerson, “the creation of beauty is Art.” We don’t need access to JP’s personal copy of Emerson’s treatises to understand that he is motivated by what he perceives to be the transcendental power of Art. I don’t expect that JP’s conversion to traditional oil on canvas painting is absolute. But the desire to hold onto something, through art, as art, is undeniably present from beginning to end in his practice, whether in the form of folded photographic posters or “heritage” oil paintings. By the end of the century— many predict well before then—North Captiva Island will be underwater, gone, disappeared, along with the majority of Florida and the majority of us, as well. On the page from Emerson that JP sent, I saw he had drawn a big circle around a particular passage: “Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally
reproductive. The beauty of nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation but for new creation.” Abstraction is a “device” we address through critique and process historically. It is also indexical with fields of lived experience and has been, in the past, articulate in ways that involved healing and spirituality. We haven’t even begun to recuperate those aspects of abstract painting. We might think of Agnes Martin, who was very clear on the metaphysics of art, and legion others who have mined the freeing potential of art. As Emerson notes, “All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art. The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity.” The little paintings, gritty with North Captiva’s sand—and accompanied in the New York exhibition by a fine set of driftwood walking sticks—are both a return and leap. Scrubbed back narrative dimensions make way for new streaming contents, new means for getting at the ineffable mysteries and joys of life. We count on JP to be out there, looking for what’s wild or curious or beautiful, and bringing it on home.
Two Places at Once 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 14 x 10 in 35.6 x 25.4 cm
I
Deposition 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 14 x 10 in 35.6 cm x 25.4 cm
II
The West Wind 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 14 x 10 in 35.6 cm x 25.4 cm
III
Nativity 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 16 x 12 in 40.6 cm x 30.5 cm
IV
Soundscape: Mangrove 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 14 x 10 in 35.6 cm x 25.4 cm
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Dissolving the Order of the Star 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 16 x 12 in 40.6 cm x 30.5 cm
VI
Nacre 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 14 x 10 in 35.6 cm x 25.4 cm
VII
Arya Vihara 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 14 x 10 35.6 cm x 25.4 cm
VIII
He Swears 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 10 x 8 in 25.4 x 20.3 cm
IX
Redfish Pass 2015 oil paint, sand, and wax on canvas 10 x 8 in 25.4 x 20.3 cm
X
Jack Pierson was born in 1960 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1984. Pierson works in several different mediums, including sculpture, photography, and video; he also makes drawings, paintings, and artists’ books. Associated with a group of artists emerging from Boston in the early and mid1980s, among them the photographers David Armstrong and Mark Morrisroe, Pierson began showing in New York in the early 1990s. He has since shown extensively both in the United States and abroad. Most recently, he has had solo exhibitions in Barcelona, Brussels, Milan, Moscow, Munich, Salzburg, and Seoul, as well as in Los Angeles and New York. In 2008, he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Irish Museum of Art in Dublin, and in 2009, he had a solo show at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga, Spain. Pierson’s work has been acquired by many important private and public collections, including the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among other museums worldwide. Pierson has had residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown and is an active board member for ACRIA. He has been a visiting artist or lecturer at numerous institutions, among them Yale University, New Haven; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MoCA, Miami; CAPC, Bordeaux, France; New York University, New York; the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and CalArts, Los Angeles. Pierson currently lives in New York and Southern California. He is represented by Cheim & Read, New York.
JACK PIERSON
onthisisland CHEIM & READ
Published on the occasion of the 2015 Cheim & Read exhibition. Design John Cheim. Essay Jan Avgikos. Editor Ellen Robinson. Photography Chris Burke and Tommy Kha. Printer Trifolio. ISBN 978–0–9914681–8–8.
All works on paper are 2014–2015 watercolor and graphite on paper 14 x 11 in 35.6 x 27.9 cm
JACK PIERSON
onthisisland CHEIM & READ