JOHN MULLEN

My first studio visit of September was with painter John Mullen, whom I have included in a few of my previous exhibitions, the most recent one being X Marks The Spot, which explored abstract styles as signatures of meaning.

What I have always liked about John’s painting is the tension between ordering and transience. There is something in it that reminds me of both Mondrian and Kandinsky, this simultaneous reordering between grids and the meandering quality of gesture in line.

His paintings once inferred places, combining nonlinear, modernist grids with negative space verging on dramaturgy, that alternate with suggestions of landscape and gestural space—that is, space defined only by a mark flowing through it. 

Since that time his work has traveled through various manifestations--such as landscape--but now it is steadfastly abstract. The canvases I saw in his studio, which ranged in size from ten by 14 inches all the way up to fifty by seventy inches were different than anything I had yet encountered in his oeuvre.

John told me that his new works were very much about the concept of loss, that they were very intentional in their use of old canvases, and that the under-painting was in fact a choice of previously unsuccessful works. 

Now how he means the word loss has a lot to do with how I will receive them. We live in a society that creates more than it can use, and creative individuals are no different. Just like a restaurant prices every item on their menu to pay not just the rest but every thing they spend money on, or buses wait until every seat is spoken for before leaving for their final destination, so also a painter wants to know that every canvas will be appreciated, and it if needs to be repurposed, then so be it. 

Loss to his oeuvre of a previous version of a set of works is a loss to his career, but it is also a loss to anyone who might have appreciated it, gallery visitor or collector; and with its being buried, the loss becomes a mystery once again.

I look at Mullen’s current canvases and I am instantly curious as to what they were before. Of course this is a fact to which can never be privy. It resides only as a memory for the artist himself. Still I can talk about my impressions of them.