Handmade Geometry

Franklin Sirmans on McArthur Binion

The emergence of abstract art is one sign that there are still men able to assert feeling in the world. Men who know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or absurd they first appear.

– Robert Motherwell, 1951

Take the eclectic flair of the rock musician Cody Chesnutt, mix it with the old school jazz feel of Dizzy Gillespie, and add a touch of the R&B crooner R. Kelly, yes, R. Kelly, and you have an idea of the magic of McArthur Binion. Unlike them, he's no musician, but Binion's work sings sweet songs, just like those cats.

Historical and up-to-date is the feel of Binion's newest works. Connections to early minimalist painters like Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Mangold abound. Yet, equally prescient in consideration of Binion's work is his family history and the history of colored American aesthetics from the South to the North.

While decidedly minimal, Binions's work has never been generated, as was Ryman's, from radical reductionism. Always interested in the ability of color and form to tell a story, he has employed representational imagery to that end, but returns time and again to the expressive capabilities of abstraction. As if to explore that dichotomy more fully, Binion periodically embarks upon series of paintings that divide the surface in half, producing a juxtaposition of style and imagery. In a series of works from 2001, Modern: Ancient: Brown, he posits a grid of laser-copied images of stereotypical illustrations of blacks with a modernist grid in mauve tones. In another, a hot pink grid is mapped via beautifully crooked blue lines, offsetting the repeated minstrel images. Other works question the viewer's own perception of the painting. In one, the outline of Angola hovers over a black grid cut by thinly layered lines of white paint. Which is the representation? If you know something of geography and colonial history you may recognize the southern African country. If you recognize the omniscient power of the grid in modernist art history, the painting may provide another reading.

Ensconced in the tradition of abstract painting, Binion danced through a minimalist period in the late 70s (1+1=3), waltzed with soft-edged geometry in the early 80s (Black: White: Relationship) and did a representational turn in the late 80s (Reflections on America). Ever since, he has used combinations of all forms, but the essence of the artist's work remains in abstraction.

Here in his newest works, human body-length finger paintings and circular gouaches, the real action of the artist's process and attachment to abstraction is revealed. Utilizing his fingers directly on board, Binion's paintings release the normal conduit of the brush from its "heroic" duty. The technique brings the painting process from thought to action to within his fingertips. He does this not to make a fuss or to pose a question regarding painting's history as a precursor and influence on conceptual and performance-based art. It is more personal and poetic than any such theoretical reading. More akin to labor; a labor that has its roots in the growth of America by black hands on crops like cotton and tobacco and colored hands on railroads. Like the fingerpaintings of young children, Binion's process is largely an unadulterated practice, the mark is pure. And each mark counts. Marks time, marks a beat.

Woven over the beat, there's a sweet melody in the form, color and line of these paintings. Listen closely.

© Franklin Sirmans 2005