Strictly Painting 5
CURATOR'S STATEMENT

The mid-Atlantic region has a long, rich history of being home to a vital art scene, and today that scene encompasses artists working in all sorts of media, from the low-tech and traditional to the high-tech and vanguard. As wide-ranging and engrossing as the variety is, it is nonetheless gratifying to take stock of artistic activity in a medium as old and entrenched as painting. When serious and accomplished, painting offers the potential for an aesthetic and intellectual experience that is not available from work in other media. This is not only due to the medium itself, which has its distinctive characteristics, but also to its venerable history, the sheer weight, persistence, and strength of the idea of painting.

For this juror, the responsibility of selecting works for an exhibition called Strictly Painting necessarily involved an obligation to pose the question, what is eligible for inclusion in such a “strictly” defined rubric? Most of the artists in this fifth installment of the series are painters in the unembellished sense of the word: they apply pigments suspended in a binder, such as oil, acrylic, water, or egg tempera, to a support, such as canvas. Some may be die-hard, orthodox in their devotion to and interpretation of the medium and willing to defend the boundaries of the discipline to the very end. Others may not be so concentrated in their commitment. They choose painting because it is a means to an end, the best way to make the image they have in mind. And still other artists may choose painting because it is flexible, able to incorporate drawing, photography, ink washes, collage, assemblage, and any number of other possibilities into the creative mix. Indeed, for many practitioners and thinkers it is this last characteristicÅ\painting’s enduring ability to be transformed and sometimes almost completely remadeÅ\that fuels the ever-expanding category’s ongoing viability.

This exhibition makes no distinction among the different types of artists, even as it includes those who technically may not be painters at all and who beg the question (especially in the present context) what is painting? Brian Balderston’s presence is pivotal in this regard. If Susan Moore’s extraordinary oil and oil stick on canvas pictures symbolize the core of classic painting concerns, to mention only one superlative example, then Balderston’s contributions exist at the outer perimeter, pushing the envelope of what is traditionally considered painting. For one work, Balderston, a conceptualist, employed video to document his masking off a portion of a wall with blue tape and coating the area with high-gloss paint. Titled 17 minutes 9.24 seconds (for robert), the piece is an homage to the luminaries Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, the latter being most famous for his composition 4'33" (1952). Related to the work of Rauschenberg and Cage, I see the video as performance art, much like Bruce Nauman’s early one-channel black-and-white videos, only less obscure. Balderston’s heady gamesmanship is ultimately less enigmatic, more overt and, at first glance, more complete than Nauman’s. If it demands less extraneous explanation it is because of painting and what Balderston’s video owes to that long history.

Nonetheless, it is work like Susan Moore’s that drives this project and is, in a sense, the project’s leading edge. Moore, like Ian Whitmore, Nora Sturges, and all the other artists, gives us new, compelling, and memorable images in paint (or about paint) that justify, by dint of their very existence, why we value the tradition so much. Whether the tradition is implied, as it is for the aforementioned, or made literal, as it is in Phyllis Plattner’s gold-leaf panel altarpieces that point directly to the Italian Renaissance, this exhibition is an effort to demonstrate how artists continue to maintain the tenuous continuum that links the present to the distant past.

If this story has a moral, it is that painting is here to stayÅ\because it is not only the domain of painters or paint. Painting has a spirit, a heart, a feeling or sensibility, but no real or measurable beginning or end. It is, as is made clear by these artists, territory to conquer, to rebel against, or with which to flirt. It is an idea whose existence is founded in a struggle that continues to be fresh and relevant, now into the 21st century. Even in a focused sampling such as this, it is difficult to lay hold of what we mean by painting. This is as much the case for artists working in the mid-Atlantic as it is for those working on the West Coast, in Europe, or some other place where painting is alive and well.

Jonathan P. Binstock
Curator of Contemporary Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.