JoAnne Carson has said, “Disrupting illusion is in my blood.” [Bomb Magazine, "Free Spirits: JoAnne Carson interviewed by David Shapiro,” July 7, 2022]
She was partly acknowledging Mark Rothko, to whom Carson’s mother had been married in the late 1930s. A few early Rothko’s, elusive and surrealist, presided over Carson’s childhood. But she was mostly speaking about her own enormously productive and inventive body of paintings, sculptures and hybrids, all of which play fast and loose with representation. Carson’s most recent paintings, however, have been doing their disrupting with more nuance and subterfuge. A newly legible grammar of light and space puts Carson’s deftly synthetic, retro-Pixar color at center stage. Seductive and sure-footed, these quasi-illusionistic landscapes have become, paradoxically, as moody and numinous as the most ambitious abstraction.
This notable uptick in Carson’s practice, not only in terms of quality but quantity, was hard-won, and involves a kind of backward trajectory through art history by way of animation. Her paintings of the previous decade tended to be more angular and anarchic, along the lines of the zippy, hand-me-down modernism of 60s budget cartoons. In recent mashups on view such as Updraft and Cloudburst (both 2022) one can still trace the rogue lineage of, say, Rocky and Bullwinkle and the Hawaiian Punch ads — a manic vein pioneered, in part, by Elizabeth Murray and still mined by contrarian contemporaries such as Carroll Dunham and Joanne Greenbaum.
But Carson’s mises-en-scene have been getting more enchanting, more cunning. The magical moonlit aura of Day for Night, or the firefly phosphorescence of Mars Rising (both 2023) are exemplars of a calm, coherent new mastery that hints at the mystical visions of desert transcendentalists like Agnes Pelton or Raymond Jonson, but by way of the crisp, pastel elegance of 50’s Disney classics such as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. (Carson is an avowed fan of Mary Blair, who contributed sophisticated concept art for those films.)
“Know-how apotheosized,” as Peter Schjeldahl described the Disney dream factory, doesn’t grow on trees [Peter Schjeldahl, “Disney Animators,” 1981, collected in The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991 University of California Press, p. 94]. Carson, having survived in 2018 the kind of medical emergency that tends to concentrate the mind, decided thereafter to devote herself to painting rather than cycle back and forth with sculpture as had been her custom. Or rather, she absorbed the step-by-step pragmatism of the sculptor (and for that matter, the animator) into a radically traditional painting practice designed to cut to the chase. Now she begins with freely sketched, but solidly germinative drawings. From these she makes thorough, energetic color studies using acrylic, collage and Photoshop before embarking on a final painting. As she put it in a recent interview:
"I realized I was too attached to the drama of problem solving, the not knowing. I could swap that out with resourcefulness. I could solve some of the problems I was having while preserving the problem." [Bomb Magazine, "Free Spirits: JoAnne Carson interviewed by David Shapiro,” July 7, 2022]
Carson often exhibits all three stages — drawing, collage, painting — as independent artworks, but rarely in complete progressions that allow us to follow along, as here in a couple of instructive cases. Thus, the drawing Young Love (2022) works out the anatomy of a knobby, contrapposto tree with vivid amputations and a jutting growth that suggests a woody version of a toddler’s toy, as well as distant hills and sidekick flower stalks, all of which will persist faithfully in subsequent elaborations. Other parts of the drawing are rich with erasure and provisional gestures, suggesting a cloud of possibilities — in particular a swooping rush of charcoal that the collage Punch Drunk Love (2022) realizes as a purple sunshower woven like a magic carpet in and out of space. The collage adds, aside from the inflationary universe of color, much botanically wanton complexity to the top branches of the tree while emphatically sculpting, one could almost say, trunk and plasticized flower petals in graphically arresting patches of saturated pigment. Finally, the painting Lovestruck (2023) replaces the sunshower with the backlit glow of dusk, and everywhere articulates detail with translucent, luminous tissues of color that ripen this impossible yet serene composition into a goofball Bellini.
Likewise, viable stations along the way have led to each of these fascinating, gorgeous, and quite moving paintings, all with the theme of a central tree-of-plenty — an ever renewable protagonist set in a responsive panorama of cosmic harmony. Carson has found not only her method but her subject. And more than ever, her mojo.
DAVID BRODY, 2023
David Brody is a painter, animator and writer based in Brooklyn
