Paulson Fontaine Press

Markers of Time includes works by Ross Bleckner, Woody De Othello, Chris Johanson and Martin Puryear. Ross Bleckner’s etchings: Early Every Morning, Early Every Evening, Eclipse, Shadow, Spinning and Winter are all observations and meditations on shifting shadows and light, mapping changes in nature. Woody De Othello’s interior scenes playfully collapse into themselves through layers of bright color and domestic form. Clocks, light switches, lamps and hourglasses point to the passing of time and the reverie of both the Surrealists and California Funk artists. Shoulders State 1 and State 2 are characteristic of Martin Puryear’s etchings. He often creates editions in stages, keeping his original plates to return to later. His sculpting process is often reductive, and with the etchings the removal of copper with acid becomes additive, pushing the image further into new space. Chris Johanson’s work grapples with the energetic immediacy of the present, the hope of the future, and the expansiveness of forever. Often using text, his free-flowing messages cut through time and place and leave us to consider our human experience.

For his latest iteration of prints, Chicago-based painter McArthur Binion (b. 1946, Macon, Mississippi) presents nine distinct editions, titled Berkeley:Suite 10-15 and Sixteen:Square 1-3. The formal and conceptual bedrock of the new works, what Binion calls his “Visual:Ear,” draws an ecstatic loop in the artist’s practice: The editions mark a return to an idea first crystalized over 50 years ago while he pursued his MFA in painting at Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Binion coined the phrase while making a drawing titled Drawn Symphony:In:Sane:Minor, 1971 and it remained dormant in his mind, but nonetheless present for decades. The concept was then reactivated and visualized on the occasion of Visual:Ear, a solo-exhibition presented by Xavier Hufkens Gallery in 2022, for which these prints served as a testing ground. According to the artist, this series represents “the clarification of my character as a painter.” Since the genesis of his DNA series in 2013, Binion’s artworks have consistently sprung forth from a base layer of imagery that the artist names the “underconscious,” atop which he layers pigmented ink and paint stick to form the frenetic geometric shapes and patterns that denote his signature aesthetic. Formerly, the “underconscious” has been almost exclusively made up of reproduced images of Binion’s personal ephemera, like his address book, birth certificate, childhood home, and portraits taken at various stages throughout his life. For his Visual:Ear works, though, the “underconscious” is made up of a musical score titled Still Standing Stuttering, which Binion commissioned from Pulitzer Prize winning composer Henry Threadgill. Thus, this particular series denotes a new horizon for his oeuvre, in that it further abstracts Binion’s auto-biographical presence in the work. The title of the score draws another loop in the artist’s practice, in that it is culled from a painting titled Stuttering:Standing:Still, 2013, which was dedicated to Binion and Threadgill’s mutual friend, Butch Morris, who was also a conductor and composer. Music, particularly jazz, has long been a significant influence on Binion’s practice, as he rubbed shoulders with musicians like Cecil Taylor, Olu Dara, Julius Hemphill and Butch Morris, as mentioned above, when he lived in New York in the 1970’s and 80’s. It also bears noting that Binion, from a young age, became adept in modes of communication that exceed the verbal, as demanded by his verbal stutter: “The visual ear is a [form of] non-verbal communication,” says the artist. With this in mind, this new body of work invites us to rely on all our senses as forms of evidence and knowledge production and gives credence to the fact that spoken language is not the only way we come to know, connect with and relate to one another. Ultimately, probing sensorial questions that range from the mundane to the existential, these prints propose the supreme value of learning to look by listening, and likewise, learning to listen by looking. -Camille Bacon