Colors and Their Names - works of Joseph Marioni on exhibit at Columbus Art Museum, Ohio

Art in America, June, 1999 by Barry Schwabsky

Having long received more attention in Europe than in the U.S., the monochrome paintings of Joseph Marioni, now on view at the Columbus Art Museum, are finally gaining wider American exposure. Tracking the changing nomenclature of Marioni's titles, the author probes the works' theoretical background.

Joseph Marioni's work has been called, approvingly, "painting not about the world but about painting."(1) Yet the paintings themselves forcefully remind us that the world we inhabit is one that is inherently colored. To say that sounds like the most banal truism, and hardly nomentous, for color is often felt to be a superficial or "secondary" property of things ("a phantasm of the sense," Hume called it) rather than inherent to visual experience. Yet, apprehended through these severe yet voluptuous paintings, something as simple as s single color--red, green, white--discloses a complex structure, and what had been an obvious fact suddenly feels strange and dramatic, a touchstone of reality. By constructing his paintings as layered sequences of transparency (and, eventually, of opacity, whether in the form of a paint stratum with more "body," as he calls it, or just the linen support), Marioni encourages us to experience color as a phenomenon with its own depth and complexity, not as a mere effect on the surface of something else.

Although Marioni has lived in New York since 1972 (having been born and raised in Cincinnati and educated at the Cincinnati Art Academy and the San Francisco Art Institute), until recently it has been easier to see his work in Europe, particularly in Germany and Austria. In fact, he did not have a one-person show in the United States between 1998 and 1996. (My own discovery of Marioni's work was through the large group show "The Broken Mirror," a painting survey organized by Kasper Konig and Hans-Ulrich Obrist for the Kunsthalle in Vienna in 1993; imagine my surprise at finding a special room within the exhibition dedicated to a New Yorker whose work was unfamiliar to me.) Since Brice Marden selected him for his first solo show at Artists Space back in 1975, Marioni has never been without discerning admirers, but only now does his American reputation seem to be catching up with him, thanks to exhibitions in 1996 and 1998 at Peter Blum Gallery in New York and a 1998 retrospective at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum. A survey covering the last 10 years of Marioni's work is on view at the Columbus Art Museum through July 18.

An artist sometimes grouped with the practitioners of so-called Radical Painting, such as Marcia Hafif or Gunter Umberg, who attempt to locate the essence of painting by means of the monochrome, Marioni claims to understand painting as a phenomenon completely given over to vision and resistant to language. But he respects language in its own role and uses it pointedly, for instance in a number of published statements and essays about his work and about painting in general. (He recently self-published a collection of half a dozen essays and two interviews, all of which had previously appeared in exhibition catalogues, under the title On the right to painting.) And there is another aspect of the painter's precise use of language that may be less noticeable, though it is, if anything, more crucial to grasping his intentions. It is his way of labeling or captioning his paintings, by which I mean not only the matter of titles, but also his description of their materials. The evident care he has taken in considering and reconsidering these apparently marginal matters shows how important they are for his own developing sense of his project; his changing approach to them is worth noticing.

Marioni has gone through several stages in designating his individual works. In the early 1970s, they were untitled, but in 1974-75, they were neither titled nor untitled, only numbered in a separate sequence for each year (thus, the two paintings from this period included in his Rose Art Museum retrospective were #23-74 and #9-75). From 1976 through 1988, each of Marioni's works was given the same title: Painting, although until 1982 each was given a numerical designation as well (e.g., Painting 1580, also seen at the Rose). No longer untitled, mind you, but called Painting, and although each is different--distinctive in dimensions, texture and above all in color--the works are identically titled, which can be taken as implying that they are all identical at least in this, that they represent painting. (Likewise, Marioni himself seems to want to represent "the painter," as a sort of role or office; in the dedication and biographical matter in the Rose catalogue, for example, just as on his studio doorbell, he is referred to not by name, but simply as "the painter.")

Marioni (in collaboration with Umberg) has written that "this kind of painting is not intended to associate with or represent some other experience."(2) The implication is not necessarily that the work does not represent, but that what it represents is the experience of painting as such. Without this modicum of representation, monochrome painting would be nothing but what Marioni and Umberg call "raw sense experience," which it is certainly not, although it "presents the least information and the most sensation of all painting."(3) In their view, "each painting is a solution that is informed by its own time and location," yet, they add, "the painter involved in the investigation of the radical painting seeks an understanding of painting that will fit the entire history of painting."(4) In other words, the painting must be a concrete experience but also embody a universal judgment; it must seek, within its time and place, to represent painting in anytime or anyplace.