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

Art in America, June, 1999 by Barry Schwabsky

Marioni's work can be understood as the pursuit of a twofold task: representing color (or, rather, particular colors, those named in his paintings' titles) and representing painting. To accomplish these tasks requires both an image and a name. For Marioni, the name may be bare and prosaic, but the image is always dense, mysterious and at once abrupt in its address yet delayed in effect. In the end, the true vividness of the experience of looking at his work resides not so much in the image as in the gap between the image and its name.

(1.) Carl Belz, "In the Studio," Joseph Marioni: Paintings 19701998, A Survey. Waltham, Mass., Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1998, p. 12.

(2.) Joseph Marioni and Gunter Umberg, "Outside the Cartouche: The Question of the View in Radical Painting" (1986), in Joseph Marioni, On the right to painting, New York, 1998, p. 4.

(3.) Ibid., p. 5.

(4.) Ibid., pp. 1, 8.

(5.) Justus Jonas, "Joseph Marioni: The Painting of Fluid Color and the Tradition of Concrete Art," (trans. Scott Kemper), Joseph Marioni: Painter, Monchengladbach: Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg Moncbengladbach, 1994, p. 47.

(6.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Colour, quoted by Roy Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, New York, Free Press, 1990, p. 566.

(7.) Joseph Marioni/Hannelore Kersting, "A Dialogue," Joseph Marioni: Painter, p. 10.

(8.) Michael Fried, "Joseph Marioni," Artforum, September 1998, p. 149. Fried's fine observation, and others like it, should not blind readers to a curious historical inaccuracy in this historian's review of Marioni's retrospective at the Rose Art Museum; Fried's misapprehension that "the monochrome fully emerged as a genre of artmaking in the wake of Minimalism" is belied by the fact that "Monochrome Malerei," the exhibition curated by Udo Kultermann, took place in Leverkusen in 1960, that is, in advance of Minimalism. A perusal of Donald Judd's writings shows clearly how aware he was, in the years just before he would arrive at what is now called Minimalism, of Yves Klein's single-color paintings; and in 1962, he was even using the German term monochrome malerei to designate a current genre (see Judd's Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Press, 1979, p. 55.).

(9.) Marioni/Kersting, p. 11.

(10.) Diana Raffman, "Perception," in A Companion to Aesthetics, edited by David Cooper, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992, pp. 319-20.

"Joseph Marioni: Paintings 1970-1998, A Survey" was seen at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass. [Apr. 5-June 28, 1998]. A catalogue that accompanied the exhibition includes essays by Carl Belz and Barbara Rose. "Joseph Marioni: Paintings 1990-1999" is on view at the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art [Mar. 27-July 18]. Paintings by Marioni are also included in the group show "Color Based Painting/High Modernism" at the Patrick Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco [May 4-June 12]. A solo exhibition titled "Triptych" opens at the Erzbischofliches Diozesan, Cologne, Germany [June 10-Sept. 19].