Jon Gregg at 55 Mercer
Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Robert Berlind
Jon Gregg's new paintings, mostly 52 inches square or 48 by 56 inches, can be read alternatively as handsome decorations, metaphysical games or restrained expressions of dark feeling. They derive their forms for the most part from large, confidently inscribed arcs that delineate vases, leaves, heads and hands. These emphatic, emblematic, personal images might well have been deduced from the abstractly conceived curves that become their contours.
The leaves shift about directionally, overlapping one another with slight variations of shape and size but without the specificity of still life done from observation. The vases vary in shape and color but, again, do not refer to particular vessels. A human presence lurks in the inference that these vases could be generalized heads and, further, by the presence of large hands that point or are clasped together or circumscribe a space. Along with the free play of a community of like-minded forms that may, in the process, metamorphose from one identity to another, Gregg introduces a restrained, mysterious suggestion of drama.
He counters the succinctness of his firmly delineated shapes with a rough, crusty surface, often laid down with a palette knife. His predilection for gray-greens, gray-pinks, pale ochers, browns, blacks and a luminous cobalt blue call up archaic Mediterranean origins, rusticated walls and early Italian frescoes. By turns they also evoke Giorgio Morandi's subtle avowals and Marsden Hartley's blunt declarations.
The sublimation inherent in Gregg's weathered classicism hints at some emotional undertow. These generalized representations could be commemorative elegies whose formal character expresses restraint in the face of a great loss. What at first viewing appear to be straightforward, if deliberately off-kilter, arrangements, give rise to psychologically compelling, associative readings.
Gregg's previous shows have featured anonymous, somewhat frightening figures crowding shallow spaces. The new paintings sustain the feel of those larger canvases while being both more compact in their design and more ambiguous in their references. At times Gregg allows some erratic impulse to disrupt the overall equilibrium of his normal procedure. Masklike forms floating across the scruffy, amorphous red ground in Red recall James Ensor. The introduction of offbeat color and rough, painterly improvisation in Prayer implies what is kept under wraps in the more decorous members of this "Heads, Hands, Leaves" series. The tension between the formal aplomb of these paintings and their anxious, edgy poetry accounts in part for their arresting power.
Also on view were facsimile portfolios, one containing fluent studies of Venetian masters and the other a series of expressionistic, dense figure groupings. The former attest to the facility of Gregg's draftsmanship, the latter to his darker imaginings.
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