Dottie Indyke     

A few years ago, Charles Thomas O’Neil made orderly and restrained abstract paintings on metal that were filled with floating biomorphic forms and subtle references to landscape.  His art-making process consisted of layering random marks that were sometimes completely obscured.

This exhibition focused on O’Neil’s work from last year, a body of dynamic paintings that show the artist’s progress.  Spontaneous mark making, organic shapes, and an earth-tone palette remain O’Neil’s stock and trade, but his imagery has evolved.  This recent work had a wildness and clarity previously absent – or that had perhaps been hidden beneath veils of paint.  O’Neil also showed a willingness here to be more expressive and to reveal many of the darker aspects of his unconscious, and this seems to be a step in the right direction; while his earlier, prettier paintings kept viewers at bay, these aimed for the marrow.

In a series of 35 oil-on-copper works, each measure 10 by 10 inches, O’Neil paints everything from basic blocks of color to floral motifs to primitive shapes rendered in a childlike fashion, running the gamut from complete abstraction to a semblance of figuration.  He plays with automatic writing, using thick, rough, angry swaths of color and powerful scratches that expose the underlying metal.

In this body of work, his shapes and his treatment of paint have become chaotic, and his vibrant and intuitively drawn forms interact closely with one another and seem to move beyond the borders of their square containers – a reflection perhaps of his recent move from expansive New Mexico to the dense, compact, forested landscape of New England.

Tom O’Neil’s paintings from the last year seem as much about the mourning of modernist painting, as its continuation. He presents the viewer with square paintings constructed of a metal support – copper or brass -upon which he works pout his compositions. Importantly, the artist is also rehearsing several painterly quotations in these works which reference moments of modernist abstraction. This is not consciously conceived, but rather a product of O’Neil’s process of painting, and then rubbing out, until gradually a flesh of pigments begins to appear, he then slowly builds the picture to completion. Nonetheless, in Untitled #1, his color runs are resonant of the feeling of early-American modernists such as Arthur Dove and Max Weber, especially in the muddy colors that seem so uniquely American. Yet the compositions of these pictures are seldom similar to those found in the work of American modernists, though there is a pronounced landscape feeling operative in some. O’Neil smartly divides many of his compositions into vertical sections which both work against the static effect of the square support, and add a visual interest that seems simultaneously historical and all his own. Again, this vertical striping seems constantly modified during the process of painting. A painting such as Untitled #2 with its vocabulary of floating biomorphic forms recalls both the surrealistic work of Magritte, and the advanced design developments of the Russian Constructivists. But there are more contemporary quotations to be found.

Untitled #3 is divided into three sections, the largest a field of yellow in which three Miro-like shapes cavort. Yet the white shape bears a descriptive contour that is clearly in debt to postwar American painters such as DeKooning or Rothenberg. O’Neil’s unique strategy in these works is to make use of the metallic support and allow the ground to appear in the paintings, whether as shapes as in Untitled #2 or as stripes on the margin to offset the composition against the square format. These works are characterized by the overwrought paint handling on the surface, not to be confused with expressionist gesture. In this instance, it is the artist’s process of coverage and erasure that results in this effect, concluding with a kind of overpainting necessary to cover a metallic support. Facility of drawing or painting is elided here in favor of a more difficult process of covering and revealing. The use of metallic ground as both color and a reflective light source announces a difficult and untested painting practice. The use of the metallic form seems to be a conceptual device to push abstraction further, to allow it to appear before our eyes as an apparition. O’Neil manages to use the metallic colors as both ground and form, constantly testing our perception of what is either background, foreground, or just visually indeterminate. This is a highly successful modernist device, especially as the metallic forms are smudged and hardly ever resolutely covered, resulting in a spatial unease for the viewer.

It is the task of the viewer to remember abstraction with these paintings, but it is the task of the artist to reinvent the abstract pictorial format. With these delicate pictures, paradoxically made of metal, Tom O’Neil does exactly that. There are other artists using copper and steel grounds – most prominently Robert Rauschenberg – but to different ends. O’Neil doesn’t attempt to complicate our visual field, but rather to surprise the eye with these metallic surfaces poised against the skins of paint, the sometimes scumbled surface, and the small square formats that never seem precious. As the metallic ground surfaces, we understand the edginess of the status of the artist in the world, as well as the discomfort of a painting style that insists upon a process-derived abstraction and find in the best of Tom O’Neil’s paintings.

“I don’t like tinkering. Whenever I go back to a painting, I try to open up the entire surface—you know, run a wash of color over it, or I’ll scrape it down, or I’ll rub it off with a rag—so that everything is back in play,” he says. “They can change pretty radically. I’ve always felt that probably the good stuff will keep coming back.”

This process is similar to mine, his stubborn approach in chasing down the final statement until it’s clear, concise.

Read More http://www.wmagazine.com/artdesign/2008/01/thomas_nozkowski#ixzz1lFWBr9rU