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

Art in America, June, 1999 by Barry Schwabsky

In speaking about his reasons for making this small but decisive modification of the support, Marioni points to its effect on the downward flow of paint. He explains that normally he applies his colors with a roller, pushing the fluid matter upward and allowing it to flow back downward. The trace of this flow is always more or less evident in the finished painting, whose wet-looking, shiny surface likewise recalls its fluid development. The paint "has a tendency to gather together as it flows downward," Marioni observes. "I taper the stretcher bars downward to visually support and enhance this effect."(7)

Through this bowing in of the painting's lower corners, the work addresses the body of the viewer in a more marked yet also a more accommodating way than would a similar painting that was a pure rectangle. It mediates between the rectilinearity of its architectural support and the curvilinear nature of both the visual field and the human body. And as Michael Fried recently noted in a review of Marioni's retrospective, "the interplay between the physicality of the support and the materiality of the pigment ... compels a recognition of the separateness of the elements or, say, of the composite nature of the painting as a whole."(8) Just as a painting of a certain color may be only approximately the named color, so a rectangular painting must be represented, for Marioni's purposes, by a not-quite-rectangular support. It is as if representation could only occur through some deviation from pure embodiment: this Red Painting is not simply a painting that is red but a painting of red, which is why it must be red in a less than clear-cut way; equally, a representation of painting calls for a deviation from a given convention of painting, like rectangularity.

In Marioni's paintings, we recognize the rich image of color each one conveys. But however intently it may be focused on concrete experiences of color, this work is highly ideated, even theoretical, in its grounding. This is clear enough in the forthright, determined look of the paintings, whose presence is never tentative or ambiguous. The theoretical background also emerges in the way the artist talks about what he does. It is not unusual for Marioni to speak of the importance of establishing "a logical and supportive relationship between the object and the painting medium that I use," for instance.(9) The volupte of color turns out, in this case, to be predicated on a severity of intent. Furthermore, the painting's image of color is never simply instantaneous or immediate, though it strikes one instantaneously and immediately; it is structured, and it unfolds in time.

As the philosopher Diana Raffman has pointed out, "our ability to discriminate or compare values considerably exceeds our ability to identify or recognize them."(10) The normally sighted person is said to be able to perceive differences among millions of shades of color, though we are capable of identifying them only by membership in a few broad categories. Our perception of some particular red is conditioned both by the fact that we can distinguish it from hundreds of other reds and by the fact that it is part of the category "red." Color, just to the extent that it is really specific, is unspecifiable.