ZXX | ROYAL HIBERNIAN ACADEMY, 2016

Artist Statement

My work is concerned with painting in the age of artificial intelligence. An age, in which, our visual understanding and appreciation are continually being upgraded, as technological advancements evolve. At the same time, I strive for my work to reflect the society in which it is produced. 

ZXX is a logical development of my Augmented Reality and Standard Deviation bodies of work. It sees me trying to take control of their corrupted elements and deviations while reflecting my continuing concerns about the processing of information. 

The name ZXX comes from a system the US Library of Congress uses to denote a book’s written language. In this context, ZXX means “No linguistic content” which I intended as a metaphor for Abstraction. Another use of ZXX, as the name of a covert typeface designed by a former NSA agent Sang Mun can be interpreted abstractly. His idea was to produce a typeface to avoid optical character recognition as used in surveillance. Around this time Edward Snowden came to the world’s attention when he revealed the shocking extent of numerous global surveillance programmes. In this climate ZXX became more enticing as a title. It seemed in tune with the zeitgeist while at the same time reflected people’s growing desire to hinder the surveillance. 

The beauty of ZXX (15) is that it has grown in the interim years since it was painted. The sense I was trying to convey was one of an organic network transmitting and receiving ideas. These transmissions were sometimes accurate, sometimes corrupted. The image goes beyond the confines of the canvas, alluding to the ever-expanding Internet and surveillance. The work is all the more relevant to me now as I feel my concerns were justified. A current interpretation of an ever-expanding organic network and democracy-suppressing surveillance universally rings true.

the new reality - john yau

New York, 2016

One of the pleasures of traveling to another country is the possibility of discovering the work of an artist that you would not have otherwise known.

This happened to me in the spring of 2013, while I was in Dublin, Ireland. During a day of visiting one gallery after another, I came across the abstract paintings of John Cronin in his solo exhibition, Standard Deviation, at Green on Red Gallery. It was apparent from the moment that I walked into the high-ceilinged gallery space that Cronin was up to something fresh and original. The most obvious thing – what first grabbed and held my attention – was his interest in the volatile nature of paint’s materiality and the ways it could be converted into ghostly and artificial light. The second thing that caught my notice was Cronin’s take on the status of painting at this point in the 21stcentury. Despite all the pronouncements of the death of art and the author, he seemed to believe that it was still possible to do something new under the sun.

The central question Cronin seemed to be raising was this: can painting look forward or is it doomed to gaze back at the past? Can it confront the chaotic present or is the admission of its demise – however ironically expressed – the only issue left for a painter to address? In lesser hands, these questions might have canceled each other out, since a concern with paint’s materiality often implies a nostalgia for the thick, muscular gestures of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, or the thin, luminous surfaces of Helen Frankenthaler and Sam Francis.  Aware of his position as a late arriver, and therefore inescapably postmodern, Cronin could have opted for such familiar moves as parody and citation, or he could have elected to retrofit a past painting style in a material other than paint. Instead, he decided to apply paint in an ambitious range of methods to flat aluminum sheets — shiny and resistant industrial surfaces, which are often abutted together, edge to edge, to form long, narrow, panoramic formats.  The paintings I saw did not look like anyone else’s, which made me want to look longer.

Standard Deviation, the exhibition’s title, offered a clue about what the artist was up to. The term is employed in statistics to signify “the measure that is used to quantify the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of data values.”[1] Closer to home, the phrase “margin of error ” is one we hear repeatedly in poll results in the months and days before an election. Cronin’s title suggests that the paintings have to do with charts, data, variation, and dispersion. At the same time, these illustrative terms could be used to describe Cronin’s use of paint, which has been poured (dispersed) and accumulated in a variety of similar and dissimilar configurations (data and variation).

One of the recurring motifs tying this diverse group of nine horizontal paintings together was the placement of three evenly spaced discs (red, black, or yellow) across the lower half of the composition. Do the discs represent the standard, with the rest of the elements  taking on various states of deviation? Some of the circles, it should be noted, are solidly painted while others have been scraped away, leaving only a trace, and still others seem to be dissolving, suggesting that the set of three circles comprise the standard, variation, and dispersion in themselves.  Which leaves the question, what is the viewer to make of the rest of the painting?

One of the strongest, most captivating things about Cronin’s paintings is the amount and diversity of visual information he brings together in a single work. Some forms seem to have been inspired by microscopic life, while others might evoke a computer screen on the fritz. What about the areas where the paint has been smeared or dragged? What about the elements that bleed into the surrounding field, as if sinking into decay? It seems to me that this condition of visual excess is a reflection of global disorder. By using paint’s materiality to evoke fields of data, “margins of error”gone awry, and corrupted and collapsing structures, Cronin has made abstractions that succeed in grappling with the digital networks and information-gathering mechanisms embedded in every part of our daily life. What makes these works even more powerful is that they never lose their identity as paintings: they don’t mimic exterior realities.

Cronin uses paint to explore the interface between the digital domain and our everyday lives. The title of his exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy is ZXX, which is a code meaning “no linguistic content.” Libraries use this code to signify documents that exist outside of language or language groups, that is, texts that are basically nonsense or gibberish. ZXX is also the name of a typeface that can be deciphered only by human eyes, a pictogram-like alphabet devised by the designer Sang Mun in response to the ubiquitous electronic surveillance of our emails, computers, and mobile phones. An idealist, Mun wants us to be able to hide in plain sight, to insert a buffer between ourselves and the various ways that what we do can be recorded.

Correspondingly, Cronin’s exhibition title suggests that he wants to make paintings that exist outside of language, works that cannot be decoded by the narratives of postmodernism to define and delimit the history and nature of painting. Only someone directly engaged with the painting can possibly decode it. This, of course, is the dream, isn’t it? Paintings are made for individuals, not for predetermined narratives about art history or for the collective good of society. The desire to escape the confines of language also explains why Cronin seems to have resisted developing a categorical style or signature signs. Moreover, by painting on a machine-produced, metal surface, he deliberately separates himself from the fine art tradition that has long been invested in oil on canvas or linen. In this critique of conventional practice, he shares something with three radical American painters, Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, and Tom Burckhardt.

In 1971-72, Nozkowski began his career by painting on commercially available canvas boards that measured 16 by 20 inches. Not only did these inexpensive, modestly scaled supports carry the stigma of association with amateur and Sunday painters, but also, more importantly, they ran directly counter to the massive paintings of Frank Stella that were being vigorously promoted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

David Reed’s exploration of the brushstroke in the late 1970s inspired him to bring together the mechanical and the handmade in panoramic formats prefiguring Cronin’s horizontally arranged aluminum panels.   His paintings, which draw from Baroque art, installation art, film, and photography, are infused with saturated color and choreographed in sudden, episodic shifts of light, shape, and texture that separate the corporeal from the spectral.

In this century, Tom Burckhardt began painting on bumpy, uneven supports made from cast plastic, sometimes daubing fat black dots around the edge as if they were thumbtacks affixing a piece of canvas to a wooden support, leading the viewer to ask, what’s real and what’s not? Each in his own way,   Cronin and his American counterparts have found imaginative  means to  move painting forward and away from a tradition bound up with masterpieces. 

Cronin’s non-absorbent surfaces deny mastery. Working on the floor, he uses various tools to apply different viscosities of paint. Puddles, drips, spills, slashes, smears, and dots mark the surfaces.  Meandering trails turn into tentacles and scarred grooves.  There are built-up furrows and ellipses. The paint, scraped and dragged across the surface, ranges from thick puddles to blistered surfaces to translucent films.

The distressed surfaces are visceral and optical, as if clashing strata (or realities) have been compressed together. Layers, forms, and colors peek through. Variations on particular configurations recur in a single work, though not necessarily in any logical manner. We cannot discern what is controlled from what is accidental, an ambiguity that provides one of the many pleasures the work has to offer. At the same time, everything in the painting seems to be going haywire — the pleasure turns bleak before becoming something else.

Cronin’s palette has more in common with the artificial colors found on computer screens and in the hand-painted experimental films of Stan Brakhage than with anything found in late 20th-century abstraction, such as color field  painting or minimalist monochrome. At times, his alizarins remind me of Technicolor horror films, at once cheesy and weird. With their glossy, metallic artificiality, his quinacridone colors could have come from a custom car shop.  Their artificiality further separates the work from the landscape, reminding us of our own deep estrangement from the natural world. What are the organisms we see in Cronin’s paintings? Are they benign or threatening, organic or genetically modified?

Cronin’s puddles, trails, grooves, ridges, and smears, often applied to long, narrow, horizontal formats, neither add up to an overall image nor dissipate into randomness and chaos. They hover in a domain that is all their own, with porous and semi-transparent forms passing through, over, and under each other, evoking a world where everything is subject to change. Are they  the algorithmic disruptions of a computer invaded by malware, traces of subatomic waves and blips, or life forms you might  glimpse through a microscope as they swim around a drop of pond water? Why am I simultaneously reminded of things that can be perceived only through a microscope, a radio telescope,  or on a computer screen? Seeing, Cronin reminds us, is never pure. It can never be free of memories and associations. In this, we sense the artist’s argument with those who believed purity was a worthwhile goal. This is really where Cronin’s astuteness becomes apparent. He can stir up divergent associations while pulling us in different directions.

What are we to make of the orange dots floating on top of the vertical smears of blue and thalo green in  “ZXX No. 8” (2016) or the ridges in “ZXX No. 7” (both 2016). Look at any of Cronin’s paintings, and you are likely to begin questioning its configurations and relationships, with a feeling of uneasiness you would rather avoid. This is the paradox animating the works. We know that we are looking at paint, but it becomes something else without losing its identity as a viscous liquid, a shiny skin, a film of luminous color. The artificial pigments come across as beautiful and poisonous, elegant and polluted, clunky and disturbing. Meanwhile, the biomorphic forms are anonymous and less than comforting, and the wrinkles, creases, and furrows seem like signs of infection. These paintings speak to our inchoate fears, our awareness that all is not right with the world.

Cronin’s paintings are a record of their coming into being, which links them to Abstract Expressionism.  The difference – and it is an important one – is that they convey no attachment to the so-called glory days of postwar painting.  They are done on aluminum and do not rely on gestural brushstrokes. Insubstantiality and substance embrace each other.  Like movies and television shows whose plots hinge on the breakdown between what is real and what is fiction, Cronin’s paintings speak directly to that state of perceptual unease. The tentacles and organisms inhabiting his paintings give off an unearthly glow. The simultaneity of the layered, transparent forms suggests that reality is not unitary and perhaps it never was. Something unexpected is always showing up, while something else is always breaking down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation