Threshold Painting by JJ Manford
10"x8" ($40) | 14"x11" ($85) | 20"x16" ($275) | 30"x24" ($1,450)
It’s sundown. You’re in France, or Italy, or maybe in the part of the American Southwest where lush forests abut foothills and mountain shears cut geometric shapes into soft vistas. The point is that you’re drinking in beauty, you’ve got a home with modern French doors, and a cat is present. Artist JJ Manford’s Threshold Painting, our debut edition with the painter, is exemplary of his body of work that depicts domestic spaces. “Recently I have been expanding my subject matter to include more exterior spaces and thresholds. This painting leans into the expressive and free quality of inventing landscape, with a Bonnardian sense of light and luminosity”, Manford explains.
The Brooklyn-based artist has historically built up electricity in the planes of his pieces using repetitive gestural marks in high chroma, as he references above in his mention of Post-Impressionist master Pierre Bonnard (between 1886 and 1905, the Post-Impressionist era expanded on Impressionism by adding brash colors and symbolism into the mix). As a capture of an interior space, Threshold Painting not only nods to Bonnard–interiors were one of his most popular foci–but expands on the exploration. By compositionally breaking out onto an exterior landscape that evokes the rhythm, energy and palette of many Fauvists (a color-drenched movement concerned with vivid, attacking hues that existed between 1905-1908) and Impressionists (a movement of artists principally interrogating light and color like Van Gogh, Monet, and Gauguin between 1867-1886), Manford skillfully dances between each approach.Â
The resulting mesmerizing piece glows. Manford also brilliantly incorporates elements of both hard-edged abstraction–like the square orange transom windows–into the piece. Additionally, he infuses Threshold Painting with Modernism, utilizing architectural themes that echo David Hockney's work. The artist incorporates a design object created by someone he admires or an animal into each piece as part of his practice and here, as another Modernist move, is a sculpturally shaped cat that would also seem right at home in one of Hockney’s works. This presence of geometric forms organizes and grounds his riotous palette, giving the piece the power to make any viewer take a deep breath and exhale as if they were there, in that space, behind that cat, looking out at the end of a beautiful day. If you're in the NYC area, you can see his work in person at "The Superfluity of Things", a group exhibition at James Cohen in Chelsea. The show runs through October 19th, so don't miss it!
