Aaron Maier-Carretero is phrasing

By the mid-70’s, painting had been declared dead.  It would of course go on to find life again, though I’ve read it has died at least once or twice since, depending on how you count that zombie stuff.  

Perhaps the best response to this declaration came courtesy of artists like Jennifer Bartlett, Robert Moskowitz, Susan Rothenberg and Lois Lane through their use of recognizable images that become “obtuse to rational explanation based on their content.  The paintings, then, are not reliant on the references inherent in the meanings attached to the image [by the viewer] but can also bring into play formal, intellectual, and painterly factors”, as described by Richard Marshall in the Whitney’s 1978 exhibition “New Image Painting”.  The result was painterly compositions freed and expanded from the pictorial limitations of historical sensibilities to establish a framework for shaping an immersive impression.  They made painting personal, again.  And alive.  And I find that very musical.

Phrasing — which is essentially the art of building an expressive structure that can anchor or shape a compositional relationship — is common in language and music.  I think these New Imagists (though Rothenberg ultimately rejected that label) were even more significant in the way they developed the image — especially a painted image — as a phrase.  Repeated images become slurs in a musical notation, and the composition embraces the viewer as abstractly as a song we recognize when we sense or smell the memory of its association.  

That’s how I feel when I see one of Aaron Maier-Carretero’s paintings.  When I was first introduced to Aaron’s work (thank you @ivagueorguieva!), I was reminded of the seduction of a New Imagist’s reverie.  But Aaron takes it a step further with an orchestration of painterly phrases and phrasemes that build a narrative of memory and recognition you can taste on your tongue.  I see a cat.  I know it’s a cat.  But the cat I see is walking a utility wire across two New York skyscrapers naked and staring into a blinding sun.  I’m willing to bet that same cat looks a lot different to you.  And that’s ok because there’s still a painted cat, and so the narrative is still plastic and grounded.  What a wonderful way to rationalize the irrational.

Aaron is keeping painting alive (again) in a phraseology reshaping a newer language in art. It’s a painting of all possibilities reduced to an essential form as fluid as it is defined.  What you see is exactly what you want it to be because it requires your recognition to be complete.  It’s brilliant stuff, indulgent and reductive and persuasive. The first thing you’ll recognize is something you thought you already knew.  But then it becomes new again, the experience of a memory reimagined. 

Check out @aaronmaier_, a very passionate painter keeping it alive in Los Angeles!

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