College
of the Redwoods Art Gallery
Past Exhibitions
JONATHON HITTNER
Paintings- “What are you looking at?”
September 2 to September 25, 2003
Reception: September 25, 2003 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.
Curator: Rebecca Murtaugh, Assistant Professor of Art
Artist Statement
These paintings are made up of intersections; they are formed
both literally and ideologically, placing the viewer in the space
between seeing and knowing, feeling and thinking. One color passes
through another, a curved line joins a line that is straight,
and intention meets accident, proposing the residue of both action
and intellect. Moments from the history of painting meet one
another and prompt an alternate associative space.
The nature of an intersection allows potentially, for a decision
to be made, a direction to be taken, and this allowance creates
a type of openness or vacancy where something must be exploited
and something must be suppressed. The resolutions contained within
these vacancies are ones of a democratic nature, left or right,
over or under, and right or wrong. The recognition that the particular
decision made is not as important as the possibility for one
to be made, is the understanding these works celebrate. Other
intersections are formed where elegance meets clumsy, flatness
meets dimensionality, subtlety meets directness, and sincerity
meets deception. The right and wrong of associations or perceptions
is not in question, whether the paintings are fields or freeways
or references to painting coded into something either foreign
or familiar is as much the question as it is the answer. The
space between memory and experience is split open to expose their
reliance on one another.
The diverse languages of painting are forced into dialogue;
the analytical purity of minimalism overlaps with the emotional
ephemerality of abstract expressionism, and so on. The questions
posed by the language of one historical moment cannot be answered
with the others’ and the conversation becomes silent, vacant,
and opens itself up to more than either previously allowed. These
paintings are the celebration of the democracy of the vacant
that occurs in our encounters with intersections, actual and
inferred.
Jonathon Hittner
2003
