Red Painting

Artists

Description

The painting is a large, vertical plane of deep mahogany red-brown acrylic, painted in two distinct layers of thick and thinly applied acrylic, beginning with a stain of dark, "Benzimidazo" brown, which acts as a primer. Its outer surface of "Azoic plum brown" appears tactile and shiny, almost sticky. The layers vary visibly in tonality and density and the plum brown surface begins to gather into extended drips that coalesce in a series of parallel rivulets about halfway down the picture plane; towards the bottom center, it pools into a series of more marked gullies and ridges, pulling apart like a painterly fjord, and lifting, like a skirt, to reveal the stain below. The acrylic also shrinks in along some of the edges, gaining thickness as it does so, and these effects, along with the implied flow of the medium , the "breathing room" between the layers, and its orientation and scale, serve to give the painting an anthropomorphic, object quality. The painting entreats one to interact with it as a whole object/image, and not as a picture of assorted forms or things or parts; it also gains considerably when viewed in daylight. The title, "Red Painting 1999 No. 4", 1999, refers to the fact that this is the fourthpainting executed by Marioni in 1999. It is part of a set of four paintings executed in anticipation of the Fogg’s selection of one, and intended to "show the range of Marioni’s approaches to his monochromes."

Dimensions

243.2 x 180.7 cm (95 3/4 x 71 1/8 in.)

Provenance

Joseph Marioni, New York, New York; to [Howard Yezerski, Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts], sold; to Martin and Deborah Hale, Boston, Massachusetts, gift; to Harvard University Art Museum, 1999.