Knox Martin: Black and White by Julio Congora
The Black and White paintings of Knox Martin give to and take from the drawing that he does all the time, as well as the interchange between large paintings, portraits and sculpture. Martin quotes Matisse: Painting is an expanded drawing. New doors are opened from one work to another. In this exchange, there is the continuous exploration of the Masters whom Knox calls Alpha Artists.
Basic to Martin's work is the perception that high art is the creation of reality. The subject matter of such art is creation and the elements that are involved are its concern. Creation feeds on the manipulation of what itself is. This is what fires his work.
These relatively small paintings contain and compress the essence of the radical; the work at work - creating senses not yet known! A work you must be tutored by! A hilarity producing consternation! A space is altered in surprise, but in a seamless way. There is no foreground or background (in the Hermetic Cubism there is always an element of foreground, middle or background), in Martin's work references to codified space are eliminated. No push or pull, in or out, up or down. This is crucial to an eventual seeing of the work and essential to its basic poetics.
The above is carried on the vehicle of esthetics. (Alex Katz, late Sixties, remarked to Knox Martin "You are the only one around with esthetics.")
We are confronted here with a devastating package of the ultimate artist! Knox Martin has picked up the torch and more! He has gone into art as no one else. His influence is endemic and hidden (you know who you are!).
Most of these paintings are of women: with flowers, sharing a bouquet with you - looking at you!
The variety within a theme is extraordinary: brush strokes echo Hals, Velazquez and Goya.
These works, modest in size (18”x 21”), bear a startling load. They have been worked on for 12 years and they have always been complete. Like a fragment of' a holograph that is clone to its prototype, these paintings individually manifest a master poetics encoding a perpetual freshness that, in the end, is the anatomy of esthetics: in each the lines wave through the flames that have burnt away all of the nonessentials, exposing the dues one must pay to wield the fire.
In Arthur Danto’s essay on Knox Martin, Adventures in Pictorial Reason, Martin's stripes and circles are "striped tents, loudly patterned costumes of clowns." Let us also include flamenco dress, polka dots, the contrasted black and white of the male Spanish dancer – Knox Martin's heritage (he was born in Colombia; his wife Isabel, was a Spanish dancer…) .
Mr. Danto concludes his essay with the statement: It is not my task here to furnish a final analysis of Knox Martin’s paintings - but to demonstrate one way of beginning such an analysis. Here, I would like to propose some questions and an answer…
What the Genesis? What connects Circus, Carnival, wild rides, Clowns, the shapes and colors of Islamic Art? What is the promise? What are the antipodes of the knowable?
A basic intuition, displaying the shadows of creation at their most elemental!
Basic to Martin's work is the perception that high art is the creation of reality. The subject matter of such art is creation and the elements that are involved are its concern. Creation feeds on the manipulation of what itself is. This is what fires his work.
These relatively small paintings contain and compress the essence of the radical; the work at work - creating senses not yet known! A work you must be tutored by! A hilarity producing consternation! A space is altered in surprise, but in a seamless way. There is no foreground or background (in the Hermetic Cubism there is always an element of foreground, middle or background), in Martin's work references to codified space are eliminated. No push or pull, in or out, up or down. This is crucial to an eventual seeing of the work and essential to its basic poetics.
The above is carried on the vehicle of esthetics. (Alex Katz, late Sixties, remarked to Knox Martin "You are the only one around with esthetics.")
We are confronted here with a devastating package of the ultimate artist! Knox Martin has picked up the torch and more! He has gone into art as no one else. His influence is endemic and hidden (you know who you are!).
Most of these paintings are of women: with flowers, sharing a bouquet with you - looking at you!
The variety within a theme is extraordinary: brush strokes echo Hals, Velazquez and Goya.
These works, modest in size (18”x 21”), bear a startling load. They have been worked on for 12 years and they have always been complete. Like a fragment of' a holograph that is clone to its prototype, these paintings individually manifest a master poetics encoding a perpetual freshness that, in the end, is the anatomy of esthetics: in each the lines wave through the flames that have burnt away all of the nonessentials, exposing the dues one must pay to wield the fire.
In Arthur Danto’s essay on Knox Martin, Adventures in Pictorial Reason, Martin's stripes and circles are "striped tents, loudly patterned costumes of clowns." Let us also include flamenco dress, polka dots, the contrasted black and white of the male Spanish dancer – Knox Martin's heritage (he was born in Colombia; his wife Isabel, was a Spanish dancer…) .
Mr. Danto concludes his essay with the statement: It is not my task here to furnish a final analysis of Knox Martin’s paintings - but to demonstrate one way of beginning such an analysis. Here, I would like to propose some questions and an answer…
What the Genesis? What connects Circus, Carnival, wild rides, Clowns, the shapes and colors of Islamic Art? What is the promise? What are the antipodes of the knowable?
A basic intuition, displaying the shadows of creation at their most elemental!