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Jim Condron’s paintings attempt to access and depict a realm of experience beyond conceptualization. If that enterprise is paradoxical, it is anything but self-defeating, and it both reflects and rewards disciplined concentration.
Condron’s work is shaped as much by its refusals as by its affirmations. He dispenses with the often facile ironies that characterize much contemporary art—ironies that, looked at steadily, reveal themselves as symptoms of exhaustion and sterility, of an essentially parasitic sensibility. His engagement with the artistic past—especially with such comparatively recent figures as de Kooning, Diebenkorn, and Guston—is sophisticated but never arch, and he affirms the possibility that applied paint can communicate realities that outstrip the intellect. In their evident mastery of the medium, his canvases are painterly; in their cognizance of the history of painting, they are erudite as well.
A Jim Condron painting always has two subjects: the paint itself, and the experience of seeing, which for Condron is largely an interior event. The figurative subject serves as an occasion to explore the relation between outer flux and inner ground, and hence between change and constancy. The act of perceiving that dynamic—the deeper subject of his work—requires giving up all ideation. Seeing then means experiencing that the inner ground of the subject and the inner ground of the painter are one and the same. But aiming for that sort of ontological depth does not mean giving up beauty; Condron is a superb colorist, with lush palettes and vibrant brushwork. The world as he sees it is a visually sumptuous place.
It is also an inviting place. Condron’s paintings display a strikingly authentic sense of space. The obligatory flatness of most modern painting, though it may involve spatial push and pull, seldom allows for the skillful creation of what might be termed participatory space, an area in which Condron excels. Relatively few contemporary painters—John Walker, Eric Aho, and Sangram Majumdar come to mind—work in this vein, which goes beyond geometric perspective and draws viewers into an organic cosmos. In Condron’s case, the effect is of his having put marks into space rather than on the canvas. In his studies of a weeping blue atlas cedar, the tree luxuriates in space, extending itself in several directions. Around it recede landscapes that one could seemingly walk into, around, and through, but they do not indicate any vanishing point. Space is rendered not geometrically but experientially, and therefore convincingly.
The cedar paintings form one of several series in which Condron depicts the same object over time, mostly en plein air. As with Cezanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire or Morandi’s domestic tableware, the sequence of canvases allows Condron to preserve the object as a sort of experimental control, so that he can examine more precisely the act of perception, even as he seeks to capture the object in what Maritain would call the act of existing. In a kind of subtraction by addition, the accumulated images convey the sense of a changeless essence discoverable beneath the shiftings of light, color, and form.
But Condron’s approach and process, as subtle as they are, would mean little if the resulting paintings didn’t resonate with viewers. And therein lies the decisive strength of his work: the common inner ground of painter and figurative subject is also shared between the painting and the viewer. Condron’s canvases present more than form, color, and light; they communicate his sense of the energy and space within each of the objects he depicts. That enlivening force endows his work with the sort of vigor and immediacy that escape all but the most accomplished and disciplined artists. A Jim Condron painting is not so much an art object as a transformative experience, one that defies discursive thought even as it engages the history of the medium.
- David Soud |