The obvious shared feature of several new paintings by Jim Condron is their relatively small size compared to other publicly displayed works by the Baltimore artist. Each of these works is about the size of a book cover, a somehow apposite comparison given the artist's explicit literary references in the past. Working at this scale encourages playfulness and experimentation, and partly for this reason these paintings have the character of milestones on a journey. By limiting the space upon which he works, the artist is required not to do more with less, necessarily – but to imagine more or to imagine deeper into a given space. Large canvasses may be particularly suitable for making bold statements, but working small often means pushing boundaries within. “Her talk is like my secret writing” (oil on paper on silk, 5 x 5.5 inches, 2013) might inspire a neo-formalist analysis by some latter-day Clement Greenberg, but what enticed this writer was the swirling milk-chocolatey paint laid thick with a knife on paper. It conjured up a sensuous memory, that of sticking my finger into a bowl of buttery cake frosting and licking it off. Truly “sensational” events tend to be channeled deep in our minds, and each of these works by Mr. Condron, layered and built up with paint as they are, combine, appeal to, and play off both the visual and tactile senses. Mr. Condron hints of his close association and love for books in the ironically titled “I have no time to read” (oil on paper on leather, 5 x 8.75 inches, 2013), in which the painting is mounted on a strip of pebbled brown morocco, for centuries a style of treated leather favored by bookbinders. He builds a dense impasto by mixing and shaping paint with a palette knife or other instrument to create uncertain topographies suggested by ridges and troughs imbued with rich color. The result is like a map representing no geographic location, but a projection instead of interior life, with edges neatly trimmed. There is a sculptural character to the work, and no reading of it seems complete without taking into account the feel of the thing. But therein lies the rub: we don't usually go around handling works of art, though perhaps we should. Strips of mink fur (re-purposed) frame the third painting, entitled “Could you hate me less” (oil on handmade paper on board, mink; 8.5 x 8.5 inches, 2013). The painting is composed of rough nodes and smooth planes of oils in moody hues of indigo, blue, olive, gold, cadmium yellow and white. These seem to bubble up and erupt from the paper as if sprung from thermal wells, a kind of materialization of emotional life. But there's something else here. At the center, in what appears to be a quiet recess, are a glancing pair of alert, calm eyes in the midst of this chromatic uproar. The eyes appear feminine. They cast a side-long look not at the viewer, but at the world beyond, as though apprehending something invisible to us. To be honest, these eyes may be nothing more than an accident of perception – another way of saying that one viewer, or many, may just be seeing things. But we have a proclivity to see things, like the image of the Virgin Mary on a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich. (Someone paid lots of money for it!) To paraphrase Nietzsche: stare into a painting long enough, and the painting will stare back. Yet if we want to respect the possibilities inherent in a work of art, and the intentions of the artist, and our own intentions as well, then we are called to respond to them by first opening ourselves to all the vivifying elements of personal experience – our senses, our memories, inclinations, feelings, thoughts. Even the “wrong” ones, the ones that put us on a different track altogether. “Make it New” was the slogan of poet Ezra Pound, a pillar of the modernist movement, to the writers and artists of the early 20th century. Pound's commandment has reverberated in the minds of creators long past his lifetime. And he came by it honestly. One of the effects of modern era, already in place since the Enlightenment, has been an over-riding concern for novelty and “originality” in the production of art. Thus we see a rapid succession of artistic developments (the “-isms”) during the last century, all the way to “post-post-modernism” and the anxious recognition that the whole enterprise has become, well, a very big business indeed. For some, maybe for many, novelty in artistic production has worn itself out. And in the digital age, what does originality even mean besides endless combination and recombination? I'm not suggesting that art has exhausted itself or that it has come to some terminus. Just the opposite. Until now, the burden of producing art has been on the makers of art (“Make it New!”). But what if the new model for artistic production is the meme, as opposed to the passive viewing of a discrete object? (Which is, for most people, what the experience of art has usually entailed.) What if, going forward, our response, individually and collectively, to a work of art becomes the crucial and dynamic element in the experience? It would certainly challenge our notion of what art is, who makes it, and how it enters our life. It also would imply an entirely different kind of encounter or engagement with art, one that is more awake, more active, and more bold.
