I2I, Joseph Marioni, at the Philips, presents a group of paintings by modern American artist
Joseph Marioni in the context of the Museum Permanent Collection.
Marioni is best known for his highly saturated paintings, constructed of multiple layers
of superimposed colors.
To be of narrative, Marioni's work explored color and light, or as he says, liquid light.
The artist applies coats of acrylic paint on stretched linen with rollers, brushes, pallet
knives, spoons, and even his own hands in order to manipulate the paint and accomplish the
sensation of flowing surface.
Marioni also shapes his canvases to control the downward flow of liquid pigment, which
by the law of gravity creates a density in the center of the composition, transparency
in the upper part, in various drips and marks down below.
It is through the interlaces of opaque and translucent, dense and fluid that Marioni's
work achieves strong visceral presence.
Marioni's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
Falk Museum, Cambridge, and Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.
The artist lives and works in New York City.
In eye-to-eye, Marioni's paintings are surrounded with works by artists from the late 19th century
to the present, who all employ color, light, and line as their primary means of expression.
One room brings together the paintings of modern European colorists, Pierre Bonard,
Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Basilikandinsky, who forade into abstraction,
while another room showcases their American counterparts, Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Albert
Pinkenrider, Georgia Keeve, and William Chase, revealing the artist's similar preoccupation
with color and light, yet different sensibilities.
Another room is dedicated to both American and European modernists, out of Gottlieb,
John Mitchell, Pete Mondrian, Ilya Bulatovsky, Franz Klein, Maria de la Silva, and Nicolas
de Steyle, who established their paintings as autonomous pictorial entities rather than
representations of reality.
Additional rooms are dedicated to John Marin, one of the first Americans to embrace abstraction
through color and line.
The Washington Color School painters, Jane Davis, Thomas Downing, Maurice Lewis, and
Kenneth Noland, who focused on the expressive power and optical effects of colors.
And finally, contemporary artists, Tio Heuser, Jorge Pardo, and Kate Shepard, who engaged
the eye in the experience of color and light.
Eye to Eye is organized as part of the Philips Collection 90 anniversary, introducing the
shared belief of the museum founder, Duncan Philips, and painter, Joseph Marioni.
Color is the most direct instrument of painting.
