Scale study: Objects, Matter, and their corresponding illusion: John Marin

Sprig Vision

John Marin’s Scale Study opens with a literal play on scale. Small Hazard, the smallest piece at 5 x 5 inches, hangs on the left wall by the entrance and is immediately set in stark contrast to Anger, the largest at 6 x 5 feet, displayed on the exhibit space’s front wall, facing the incoming viewer. “I paint whatever I want,” Marin states in his social media bio. Yet, the apparent randomness of Marin’s “whatever” is anything but arbitrary—it is shaped by an idiosyncratic painterly intuition. If intuition is, as Lauren Berlant writes, the “dynamic sensual data gathering” where “affect takes shape in forms whose job it is to make reliable sense of life,” then the intuition in Scale Study transforms the white cube of the gallery into syncretic space. The prologue to this mythopoetic syncretism is playfully presented in the series of three dog paintings that greet – or warn – the viewer: “Anger,” portraying a visibly furious Chihuahua guarding skeletal remains, flanked on either side by “...01” and “...02,” which depict a seemingly docile Husky and Terrier. Together, they conjure the image of Cerberus from Greek myth. The syncretic space of Scale Study gains further density as one reaches the back corner of the exhibit. Arranged sequentially are Minimal Sight Control, which renders a detail from Francesco del Cossa’s Sta Lucia in Marin’s signature greyscale; Kaiju Presence, which sets the iconic feeding trough of Christian mythopoesis in chiaroscuro focus; and Big Minority, a painterly reproduction of a creased photograph depicting an unnamed indigenous group from image archives.

Marin further develops his motif of mark-making, prominently featured in his recent show Doon, May Mohon (Blanc Gallery, 2024), where he applied urban map gridlines onto romantic landscape paintings using paint transfer methods. In Scale Study, this motif appears as white imprints of actual plant branches, rendered using the same paint transfer techniques. The white marks evoke, depending on the painterly subject, a range of forms – from river tributaries to Lichtenberg figures – and disrupt the picture plane in various ways: perhaps as a flash of lightning in Kaiju Figure, as the spectral echoes of Sta. Lucia’s sprig in Minimal Sight Control, or as a photographic crease in Pressure, and Last Riddle: What’s in my pocket? They achieve maximum painterly ambiguity in Small Hazard, where, constrained by the smaller size of the work, both the fire and the paint-transferred mark are more visible as painterly gestures than as figuration. As the exhibit space constructed by Scale Study and its juxtapositions is a potentially epistemic space, the paint-transferred marks resemble too the arboreal and rhizomatic abstractions that underlie syncretic processes.

In del Cossa, Sta Lucia has not only not lost her eyes, but has grown for herself another pair, budding from a plucked sprig. Marin takes this distinctive detail and replaces del Cossa’s embossed radiant Renaissance gold with his signature black, grays, and white, prompting us to see by his painterly terms. By superimposing abstract and realist modes without smoothing over their disjunctions, by letting their tensions be, the objects of Scale Study are as much their destabilized picture planes and the interstitial spaces that emerge from their juxtapositions as they are the photo-realistic renderings of cathected images.

Raymond de Borja