Lot 635 D

“Jospeh Marioni occupies an extreme, uncompromising position and rightly sees himself as a radical painter who, in the original sense of the word, reflects upon the causal conditions and contexts of painting. He defines painting as an image of a painted colour in which the act of painting correlates the corporeal components of colour, canvas, and stretcher and, in an artistic process of transformation, bestows upon them the quality of a painting. As much as Marioni renounces intrapictorial principles, such as a composition or serial order, he equally elevates the relation between the constitutive factors of a painting to a theme in itself whereby the proportion of technically determined elements are also taken into account. The classic relationship of the figure and the ground, for example, is reduced to the question of the relationship of colour and picture carrier. As within painting it is the colour's purpose to be painted, only painting itself can expose the actual colour. Hence, Marioni's approach is dialectic as the dissociated components of paint and picture carrier undergo a creative synthesis through the artist's action. The result is an image of painting. - An image that moreover categorically reflects ­its function as a sensual process of perception so that the consequential correlation to the observer, the emotional, physically presupposed relationship developing between the picture and the observer, becomes a meaningful concern." (Hanelore Kersting, Über die Radikalität von Joseph Marioni, Ein Nachwort, in: Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach (ed.) Jospeh Marion Malerei, exhib.cat. Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach 1988, p.46)