2014
Joe Steiner at ARC Gallery, through June 21
The painter, Joe Steiner, has been his own favorite subject for the past 50 years, though he has addressed his personal image
with more curiosity than
satisfaction. “Who is that man in the mirror?” he always
seems to ask. Answers have ranged from
“cute young dude” (age 25) to “wizened old
sage” (age 75). Humor and
bewilderment characterize the intervening years, and he’s more than a little
chagrined by the aging of his sagging body.
1995
His work is less about the expressive possibilities of
painting. But though he’s self taught, he has become much more adept than those
who are limited by the photographs that
they copy. He paints spatial
relationships as they appear from a single point-of-view, so his paintings naturally display a one-point perspective. This can be rather dramatic when painting his
standing body as reflected from a mirror
high up on the wall. He also looks at 20th
C. art, so he enjoys a sense of expressive freedom.
His earliest efforts, though a bit awkward, still could be quite expressive. A dual portrait, standing in profile behind his father, reveals what must have been a
difficult transition to independent adulthood.
Like humorous cartoons, the expressive human figure is the focus of each
and every painting. The eye is not
encouraged to linger and enjoy colors or forms,
nor is the mind encouraged to
linger over puzzling ideas, other than his biography. Each
painting just tells us “I am what I am”, with no hint of where he would like
to go or what's happened to him, and no sense of transcendence
into a larger scheme of things.
And yet – over the past 50 years, his painting has
consistently gotten better, with progressively greater control over space, more energy in the design, and a greater
sense of mystery. His latest self portrait
doesn’t even seem to be about him so much any more. He now is making the best paintings
of his life.
This is a man who knows
how to age well.
