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

Art in America, June, 1999 by Barry Schwabsky

Since 1989, Marioni has been incorporating the names of colors into his works: White Painting, Yellow Painting, Orange Painting, Red Painting, Green Painting, Blue Painting and (rarely) Black Painting. Earth tones, on the other hand, seem to be absent from Marioni's work; he has never made a Brown Painting, or for that matter a Gray Painting. (The paintings are still numbered according to their yearly sequence, but the numbering is sequestered from the title, which remains absolute and follows the date.)

Marcel Duchamp spoke of the title as "an invisible color" added to the work, something that can, from case to case, subtly shade or dramatically contrast the visible colors presented on the surface of a painting. In an unexpected way, Marioni proves Duchamp's thesis, because the colors "white," "yellow," "green," etc., are represented in his work as much through their titles as through their visual presences. The specificity of visual experience offered by the paintings themselves always, to some degree, escapes the broad categories named in the titles. No two of his paintings are exactly the same color. Color in painting, because it is always relational, even in a putatively monochromatic painting like one of Marioni's--more accurately, "an approximately monochromatic painting," as one critic has observed(5)--makes a mockery of the idea of sameness which underlies categorization. "Imagine someone pointing to a spot in the iris in a face by Rembrandt and saying `the wall in my room should be painted this color'" (Wittgenstein).(6)

Looking at Green Painting (1992, no. 22), in Marioni's recent show at Peter Blum, I would not necessarily, before reading the title, have seen the painting as green, but rather, if anything, as a peculiar gray with olive shadings. Green, in anything like the guise in which I imagine it on hearing the word, appeared only glancingly, when I looked at the painting, not straight on but from an oblique angle while standing to the right of it. And even then, as I quickly realized, this apparition of green played across the painting's surface only because of the reflection upon it of the big Yellow Painting (1998, no. 21), hung catty-corner to its left. And then what about those reddish streaks quite visible in the first painting, especially toward the bottom? They seemed to have just as much right to identify the painting as that almost-absent green. Just as ambiguous was White Painting (1998, No. 24), which I would rather have called ivory, though it shaded at the top toward a definite yellow. If the name ivory be disallowed, this could have been called Yellow Painting; likewise, a couple of the red paintings in the show, in particular one from 1996, might just as well have been called violet.

In 1981 Marioni stopped using standard rectangular stretchers in favor of ones which become slightly narrower toward the bottom. Also, the bottom edge of each painting is stretched across a rounded rather than a rectilinear stretcher bar. Thus, the materials are not described as being merely "acrylic on linen" but rather "acrylic and linen on stretcher"--a swerve away from standard designation as significant as, say, Lawrence Weiner's decision to label his text-on-wall pieces as being composed of "language and the materials referred to." Marioni's modification of the stretcher does not result in "shaped paintings" in the manner of Ellsworth Kelly, however; his works always refer to the very rectangle which they do not quite embody.