RICHARD JOSEPH

Richard Joseph’s recent paintings evidence both a return and an advance. Thirty years’ worth of formal experimentation is here synthesized with the artist’s original pictorial impulse. Like many of his generation, Joseph (whose Dartmouth undergraduate training was in philosophy rather than art) began his technical development with a derivative form of Abstract Expressionism. When this apprenticeship ended, the shift to a personal style could not have been more radical. In the 1970s, after completing his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he became a well-regarded practitioner of descriptive realism. His large oil-on-canvas works, each of which could take a year to produce, featured deep illusionistic space, “perfect” surfaces, and often classically hierarchical figure compositions. Although the pictures illustrated no explicit story—indeed their narrative ambiguity was part of their allure—they did very persuasively evoke a world exactingly observed and scrupulously comprehended.

Joseph’s eventual rejection of these representational devices—and the epistemological certainty they seemed to entail—came about not through an intellectual crisis but, more appropriately, through a rejuvenation of seeing. For many years while teaching at UCLA, Joseph worked from photographs of studio set-ups he had himself staged and shot. Eventually, he came to feel that the flatness of photographic images and the glossy unnaturalness of their color contributed to a now troubling artificiality in his most “realistic” work—especially in contrast to the images he produced once each week at a group drawing session using the live model. (A human being, after all, is much less like a monument than like a process in continuous flux.) Classic, all-in-focus pictorialism, he concluded, is not a visual given but a rational construct—and one that fully reflects neither the physical complexity of the subjects nor the sporadic restlessness of actual vision.

In the 1980s, therefore, Joseph took up a more dynamic style of figuration, rendered in acrylics and centered on single individuals walking vigorously past flat monochrome backgrounds. A multi-colored blurring of limbs against such limbo-like fields gave a sense of existential isolation, and of quietly frenetic desperation, to these relatively simple scenes. As Joseph then began to reintroduce multiple incidents, his color faded to an Old Masterish tone (thus emphasizing formal rather than chromatic interplay), and the complex characteristics of his current practice—influenced by exposure to Tintoretto and Caravaggio during his 1967 fellowship travels in Italy—emerged in profusion.

In the primary features of Joseph’s work in this decade [i.e. the 1990s] since his move to New York, the will-to-action and the will-to-stasis confront each other and fight to a draw. The compositions remain figurative, but in a partially abstracted way that echoes the fluidity both of the subjects’ motion and of the viewer’s sight. Each canvas is structured, Rothko-fashion, with three variously proportioned horizontal bands—suggesting a zone of intense human interaction suspended between earth and sky, past and future. Colors are subdued, almost dingy, recalling sodden battlefields and the myth (whether in a primitive or scientific version) of mankind’s creation out of the primordial ooze. Light seems not so much to radiate from particular sources as to well up diffusely from within certain broad areas. Surfaces flicker somberly, like the walls of Lascaux glimpsed by firelight. The implied space is sometimes that of architectural interiors based on the Piranesian volumes of New York’s subway stations, sometimes that of indistinct but clearly non-bucolic exteriors, either urban or open.

But the most striking feature of these canvases is their neo-
Ab-Ex agitation of the acrylic paint surface. This orchestrated turbulence is doubly apropos, corresponding first to Joseph’s productive method—a tortuous painting and repainting in response to his darting, continually self-revising thought process—and second to his thematic concerns: the sheer physicality of our existence (for which the heavily worked paint serves as a visual synecdoche) and the indeterminant, always imperfect nature of human understanding. In some pictures, his figures (looking like Kokoschka characters further dissolved and mixed with their surroundings) await trains that will carry them they know not where. Outdoors, whether the originating image is one of rush hour or of combat, the subjects often meet in a generalized tangle of contending forces. Their murky chaos resembles that in Matthew Arnold’s 1867 ”Dover Beach,” a lament for the lost certainties of a receding age of faith: “And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Joseph still begins with photographs—found shots now—and even does preparatory drawings, but his painterly dialogue with the canvas inevitably alters these images almost beyond recognition. Attacking with brush, palette knife, and fingers, he translates the narrative drama of his ostensible subject (people jostling on the street, etc.) into the true drama of artistic means. Joseph’s work has evolved, since the ‘70s, from the settled to the unsettled. This achieved irresolution is, indeed, a candid material correlative of what we might call the artist’s tragic eye—his perception that the impassioned muddle of human life transpires, for better or for worse, between immense prenatal and posthumous voids. Consequently, there is something Giacometti-like in his alien spaces, something reminiscent of Beckett in his blurred and abandoned (yet endlessly persistent) figures.

To live is to be animate. Joseph’s self-assigned task is not merely to depict this truism but to incorporate it into the very stuff of art. In the thickly built-up pigment of his canvases, in their swirls and splots and slashes, we see a completely disabused vitality at work. The difficulty and ultimate futility of all effort—including esthetic effort—are clearly acknowledged, yet never used as a moral alibi, an excuse to desist from endeavor. “What we can do, we must,” the Greeks liked to say. T.S. Eliot, well acquainted with modern despair, put it in a more theological form: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Where, then, is one to position Joseph among contemporary painters? He has eschewed Pop references and topical issues; he does not put his work at the service of political causes or theoretic dogmas. In short, he ignores popular culture in favor of a gritty humanism that has affinities to the School of London, mingled with an eternalism akin to that of Agnes Martin. Yet he does not claim any transcendental agenda. A purely secular intelligence is revealed in its effects, and—for this artist—its effects are physical, embodied in the authoritative manipulation of paint.

Joseph is, in one respect, a realist still, for his images and his technique together bespeak a psychological verism. He reminds us that we attain our ends, if at all, only by fits and starts, bold gestures followed by qualifications, false leads and dead ends, confrontations and retreats, mad spurts and periods of lassitude. Our lives, very much in the manner of his dimly lit engagements, are far from being orderly sweeps to unquestioned victory; instead we grope interminably in the muck and mire, able to assess our condition at any given moment only by tallying up gains and losses in a painful calculus of net results. So, too, the neo-Action painter works, his mind—or hand—forever generating new configurations, even after a canvas has been declared officially finished. But we know, as he does, that the work is never really done—until we are.

Here Joseph rejoins the larger community and its collective fate. In those exaltant moments when the painter’s mind follows rather than preceding and guiding his hand, true comprehension comes to him no sooner, and no more clearly, than it does to a stranger. For every gifted artist is, in some sense, a stranger to his talent and thus, like us all, to the deepest reaches of himself.

Richard Vine is an editor and writer for Art in America