Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Joseph Marioni
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
New York, NY: Yares Art (Exhibition: Homage to Joseph Marioni)
79%
Orange. 2021. Acrylic and linen on stretcher
You could call Marioni's paintings "lapsed monochromes." The greater the lapse, the better the work tends to be, but the more, also, it seems to have failed conceptually. This is the double bind of Marioni's approach: the extent to which his artworks (and I'm cribbing here from Michael Fried) succeed as paintings is the extent to which they make themselves known as objects. Since one or the other — their painterliness, their objecthood — has to win out ultimately in our judgement of them as works of art, there's always some residuum, some slough of our raw experience of these things, which we sense that our judgement can't but fail to account for. The more painting-like of his paintings (like this one) are better because they court their literalness without ever succumbing to it; then again, the way some of the other works do succumb can be awesome, if aesthetically ungrounding. Here, the Olitski-like banding in orange around that core of yellow paint announces depth and dimension: it holds the smooth glinting surface of the painting inside of some sort of pictorial space, enframes it. And then, from behind that layer of acrylic, the actual texture of the canvas pushes through like pockmarks — with emphatic, palpable realness. But it's all bound by the orange, plunged into depth by it and so transformed into something purely visual. It's fathomlessly stimulating... but are we coddled by painting? (TFS, 2025)