John Luna’s Home Show and sale by Debora Alanna

PART 1

Eyes born of night

are not eyes that see:

they are eyes that invent

what we see.

From: The Constellation of the Body

by Octavio Paz. Figures & Figurations (2008)

Permitting an elucidating intimation of intimacy born of layers of meaning, a sampling of John Luna’s previously exhibited painting over the last decade graced the walls of his home for a two-day glimpse this past June. Luna’s pellucid offering was too briefly presented.  The time allotted too fleeting. Like a novel that engages you within the first sentence and you must return to at the earliest opportunity, Luna’s work demands further attention. Luna’s art takes time to breathe in - each breath imbibing a persuasive aroma of an intricate, sensuous mystery. Windows of confident tenderness and convincing ache, where indulgence of beauty’s excruciating disposition appears entail more than a peek.

Untitled (Delft Shepherd to Ghost) from Untitled Suite (#5/8) (2000) might be titled to refer to a period of Delft blue faience where glazed earthenware decorated with opaque colors may implicitly direct us to that historical time and place, to a shepherd on a plate in the 1600s, a nostalgic pastoral simplicity, to survival’s necessity. The wagging ghostly finger could be the subtext to shepherding of relationships, or a reference to the movie, “The Good Shepherd” based on Norman Mailer’s book, Harlot’s Ghost. The allusions are all conjecture. We cannot know without asking. The naming of this work suggests how the viewer may enter into thinking about the work. In her essay, “The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire’s International Sensibility and the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity”[1], Margueritte Murphy cites Charles Baudelaire’s inquiry into understanding Chinese ceramics:


What would he say, if faced with a product of China—something weird, strange, distorted in form, intense in color and sometimes delicate to the point of evanescence? (…)—it is necessary for him, by means of a phenomenon of the will acting upon the imagination, to learn of himself to participate in the surroundings which have given birth to this singular flowering.

What is important is the ability of the viewer to intervene, to wander in the bucolic. Scouring the surface, unlike Jasper John’s search in Good Time Charley (1961), Luna’s encircling is caring while circumventing exactitude. Perhaps learning its definition, he traverses liberty as he circumscribes Eros, a paling, subtle space. Bulging, blistering blue with familiarity and hope, what is most striking is the luminosity that sings of haunting memories, which cannot be titled.

Buttress (2001) portrays an encumbered, covetous and madly reinforced vigor. Using fierce Franz Kline black, charged ominous rivers streaked with vivid blue vitality washed with pale yellow thrusts between arches of intractable fleshy tenderness. The intermediate is decisive, intervening with separating dominance. Leaning, favouring the brighter, widened curve on the left a spilling of watery xanthous bleeds and diverges to the other marred, withdrawing sphere that seeps out transitory yearning, wistfully.

Drawn in the peripatetic spirit of Dali’s “Catastrophic Writing”, Quatrefoil (2001) is an ominous disclosure where adversity is intertwined within the strengthening structure of the four delineated familial foils, interlocking power. Luna’s roughly stretched thick, palpable fawn painted burlap calls attention to the coarse fabric bite and endurance of the wood support, which holds the uneasy shield. A confused, stained interior of rough, circuitously drawn outlines with meandering marks, awkwardly. Oozing of cobalt infiltrates, articulating the ideal arising from absence:

                                         

      For his art did expresse                                                                         

A quintessence even from nothingnesse,

From dull privations, and leane emptiness:

He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

From: A Nocturnal upon St. Lucie's Day by John Donne

 

Luna’s East Estuary (2002-2003) is where billowing courses of preoccupied energy meet pressing tides of change. The heat, smarting red infiltrates. Rabbit skin glue pigments under white peeled paper, channeling the widening horizontal waves ripped by underlying crimson, his colour is grounded and mortal. Impasto and tear texture the breakers. Clyfford Still:  "I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit."

[2]

  Luna fuses an emergent surge.

Luna paints silence, a quieted whiteland, where the void is incised by elliptical apertures, sacred Yoni, opening into deified space. Data, Davadhvam, Damyata (2002) cleaves like an avatar, illustrating the personification of virtues described in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishads. In his poem, The Wasteland, T.S. Elliot adopts characters’ qualities from the second Brahmana passage of “The Three Cardinal Virtues”, [3] datta  (charity), dayadhvam (compassion) and damyata (restraint). [4] Launching this precept, a path of moral excellence emerges. But Luna includes 4 ellipses [5]  in this work. Cut carefully, vertical vacancies in the painted surface readdress the virtuous course, acknowledging human inadequacy. The lowest and nearly determined opening has the remnants of the elliptical cutout hanging. Discerped from virtuous ideals, and dangling, mortality demands a connection between a suspended vision. Needing to know the process is a means to realize what is wanting.

Winter Composition (2003-2004) is a flourishing use of material to build up a stormy palette, inundated with chilly thrashing. Seemingly blithe strokes of sky meander above restlessly smeared, sandy earth. The watery discharge below jumps, cuts and smears into the middle ground from somber suffusion. Amee F. Carmines wrote that Paul Celan explores the ‘frozen rubble of language and humanity, salvaging a warm pulse, even though the carrier of that warmth is banished and burned. He seeks something that can only be found on the edge of silence” [6] I’m wintering over to you. ~ Paul Celan (Snow Part) [7] Luna’s winter swells and thrashes with contrapuntal intensity of harmonious discord. Influencing turquoise is tortuous and pulsating, pervading the central hush – Luna’s brumal season.

Canyon [front] & [verso] has a similar dual existence as Window (2003-2008), Sign (2008-2009) and Messenger (2008 -2009), reviewed on the Exhibit-v blog . [8] Canyon [front] is a chasm where erotic contemplation hovers and becomes a melancholic memory held tight and succinct. Canyon [verso] ties memory, reticulating reason into a grey twist, an entwined prickly tract.

It takes time to absorb John Luna’s paintings. Because he gives you plenty of surface loci to focus and ponder, suggestive materiality to feel, poetic maturity to allow thought divergence, expand insight. And profound scholarly knowledge references to discover, if willing, which will ultimately stimulate further awakening. The looking cannot be rushed. He dissuades cunctation, as his work identifies urgent, purposeful questions that demand concentration, now. Precipitance will prohibit knowing, or what can be known or felt. Feeling is germane. Surfaces are rough, scarred, besieged with colour and incised with distress. The works caress space and we recognize the longing for delicacy of soul’s refinement. Luna’s paintings are strength weighing, stretching fear’s wrapping to breakage, the point of positioned views where past presents and future is possibility.

PART 2

Over a diminutive tajine of salt, bread and Moroccan soup, John Luna spoke about his inspiration, motivation, and art practice. Tumbling ideas, interweaving angulated poetics with quotes, I tried to assimilate each explanation in hyperspeed tangents of thought and I wandered from his original remarks, over and over. Looking at my notebook afterwards, I realized I had only snippets of the conversation written in a scrawl I would barely decipher, having to write at least as fast as John Luna spoke, which was not possible. Using a recording device might have been useful, but would have detrimentally coloured the conversation, I thought. So, I will relay a collage, morsels of Luna’s acumen in no particular order that I managed to learn. His ideas are all with variably specific contexts, and are recorded as faithfully as possible, however, are not transcribed entirely verbatim.

John Luna likes to be at home (big thing), home being where there is an adequate language of relationship, being somewhere and not be there, maybe no where in particular. He refers to Paul Celan’s The Straightening: “no body asks after you”. He says these lines are poetic directions, and “in part, risk language”.

The topic of Jasper Johns’ ruler paintings demonstrate Luna’s attention to use of tools, where he observed an absence and inertia. Inertia resulting when wants, fault, problem, over shooting, and bearing exist. Abandon is a kind of absence, proof you were there, being led array, “an alleviation of burden”.

Luna imparted that your (your – collectively, he uses the collective ‘you’, as opposed to ‘I’ because ‘I’ is a distraction, “pain of ass”. He is uncomfortable with personal, indirectness) dreams are microbes, little lights that expiate burden. Slow insufficiency pours. Homonymy is how dreams work.

He talked about the serious repetitions of gesture. “Being in slipstream feeling.” He relayed the “way of relating to equatorial fatalism” - self secrecy. And mentioned an “anxious, just in case (feeling) vs. compulsion”.  He spoke about fear as a transaction. And ethics, which are “hard to make clear”. He speaks about Beuys as a resistant character, and impurity, as the action of Darwin.

Paraphrasing Cezanne: ~ “I will always be the primitive of the path I discover.” ~ Luna explained that in his work, Eros is “a state of tension, all at once available”. Although a distraction, as in Rauschenberg (Luna says). The act of irritating a surface becomes fatigue, tension. Tension is valued. Having a job, task, a reusable one that evolves ~ the temporary doing and undoing of knots. Landscape relocates the crisis/problem history with structure. And can be “danger swapping”.

He refers to 'Bataille' and 'Formless' (referring to Formless: A User's Guide by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E Krauss), an invaluable book for him. He is now reading Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, which he also thinks is great.

He talked about character development, about being an artist/teacher, the stability required to make art with art school as an outlet, providing freedom. And trust. Creating an imaginary social life, as expression - this becomes an “expanding conceit”. Luna relays how relationships shift and how the blurring autonomy of work impacts the domestic setting.

Auspicious and humbling, Luna wants to be “just domestic” make work about the lyric domestic space, disappear into the domestic landscape, and be with the work. Endeavoring to pass into anecdote, he creates persona, and resists insecurity. John Luna is treasure.

PART 3

Giacometti approached, nuzzled by a dark silky guardian. The dog bade him welcome. “John Luna has been waiting for you.” the dog communicated. The tall, walking man’s suspicious eyes approaching the doorway asked, “Why?” Giacometti’s look returned, “Because.” 

With a mouthful of home-made steamed baguette dripping with melted butter, Dante appeared in the doorway, beckoning and spoke excitedly from the porch. “In this house dwells a divine comedy. St. Lucy’s eyes are everywhere. Courtly love challenges intimacy lyric.” Upon entering, a quatrefoil was secreted, visible through a glass door, mirroring.

Inside the salon, they faced newly painted grey walls gathering abstracted thought. Straightening the aged estuary canvas, “(It) shows me up better.” Luna grinned. “It peels away memories,” Jasper Johns added, having just coming into the room to join the others.

Having come into the house silently, the others saw him beyond a cut-out aperture to the fore room. Paul Celan spoke, sharing his usual complexities as he turns over one of Luna’s reversible paintings. “Glad to see I can see both side of the questions you pose.”

Smelling of ages, Cezanne floated in, stealthily hovering behind Luna, whispering, “I swear I have seen you somewhere, some winter on the Riviera, perhaps?”

Poking his finger rhythmically through some ellipses, T. S. Elliot shouted to the others from an adjacent canvas, “Dot, dot, dot and into infinity…” (No one could remember exactly when he arrived.)

Baudelaire wandered up the stairs and joined, “There is a shining girl hanging from a tree!” “Let’s drink some of your redolence over coffee and talk.”
Absence is present.

25 & 26 June 2011

Victoria BC

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[1] http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/0230551165.Pdf
[2] Clyfford Still, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p.123
[3] http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/4081/WasteLand.html#431
[4] http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/east-meets-west.html
[5] “[Greek, ellipsis, a want, defect, ellipsis < to fall short, leave undone > en-, in + leipein, to leave].” Webster’s New World Dictionary. World Publishing Company. 3^rd ed. 1958. Print.]
[6] www.unca.edu/postscript/postscript5/ps5.5.pdf
[7] Schneepart (Snow Part), translated by Ian Fairley (2007)
[8] http://exhibit-v.blogspot.com/2010/08/john-luna-tyler-hodgins-storage-room.html