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Jonathan Aseron catalog essay by Katie Geha: Jonathan Aseron makes sculptural paintings that are simultaneously junky & elegant. The junkiness of the work derives from Aseron's choice of materials, & the elegance from the decisions he makes in the arrangement of these materials. Scraps of unfinished wood, felt, vellum & construction paper, layered with sections of thick acrylic paint add up to meticulously flat-footed, large-scale works that mix abstraction & representation. Aseron began as a painter at the University of Georgia, Athens. He was interested in the canvas retaining a visual weight, & thus, applied thick swatches of paint to create densely layered abstractions. The weight soon became too much, & Aseron, unsatisfied with his heavy canvases, moved toward a sense of lightness. Today, Aseron often sits in his studio, pulling scraps from one of the many large trash bags filled with fabric, paper & wood remnants that fill the space. After his stint with heavy painting, Aseron now works with scrap material, arranging and rearranging the pieces on a large skein of paper. Painting for Aseron is now a process of editing. In fact, he does not distinguish the works primarily as paintings. Rather, he often refers to them as a type of sculptural painting. "I want them to read as paintings," Aseron explains, "but still retain a feeling of objectness." This objectness embodies a movement in contemporary art that challenges the competing strains of abstraction and representation while blurring the distinctions between the traditional modernist tropes of painting -- figuration, landscape and perspective. Representation does not have to equal illusion and abstraction is not tied to the materiality of the paint on the canvas. Instead, contemporary artists, like Aseron, are making pictures that are abstract yet contain illusion, or are figural but are also concerned with the application of paint on canvas. Aseron's play with these tropes is most apparent in Untitled (2008). The large work is operating in the realm of a traditional landscape while also skirting the definitive lines of abstraction & representation. The work contains broken-down planes of perspective. The bottom half suggests a cross section of earth strata, another section reveals a bird's-eye view of a gridded landscape, while another part depicts the curved lines of a road. A red-tipped mountain mound sways in the background, two lines of pink construction paper affixed to wood sit in the foreground. However, as the spectator registers the materials & paints, the foreground & the background begin to shift. The tension between the abstract & the figural, the tenets of painting & the play of collage is what makes Aseron's work so fun to look at. Brightly colored, with thick daubs of paint, what at first looks like a child's game of cut & paste is revealed to be a sophisticated meditation on playing with the rules of painting. Yet, Aseron does not suggest a new set of rules -- Untitled is hung loosely on the wall, held up by an insecure prop affixed to the floor. The work, thus, sits tentatively on the wall, just on the cusp, ready to fall. |
