“To me, the essence of sculpture is mass. You feel mass in sculpture. In architecture, you feel volume. And painting stresses surface. And I wanted to have some volume suggested, and some mass, but I don't like either one, and I don't want to work with either one. I want volume and mass in there, and I want it reduced to the least volume and the least mass, but to feel that it's there. So it's all for the purpose of surface.”
C reating illusive depth through vivid color and a dimensional use of canvas, Forbidden Island from 1984 epitomizes Ron Gorchov’s revolutionary approach to art making. Pale blues, peach pink and bright whites stretch exuberantly across the deliberately curved, saddle-shaped canvas establishing a magnificent cacophony of shapes and colors with intricate depth. Blending the grandeur of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists who preceded him with the inventive approach of his contemporaries such as Elizabeth Murray, Frank Stella and Lynda Benglis and their experimentation with painterly sculptural forms, Ron Gorchov rejects neat categorization. Stripping the act of painting back to a primal state with raw materiality, Gorchov’s curved constructions and fields of color evoke the rough impasto-ed surfaces of Clyfford Still.
“I think we can always redefine something. I wouldn't want to have a fixed definition of art. l'd like to keep it freer. Also, art is one of those things that, if you expect art to keep growing, you have to believe that people will keep doing art.”
Capturing the dynamic and immersive nature of sculpture on canvas, Gorchov’s groundbreaking paintings attain a sculptural quality, as they swell outwards from the wall as if compelled by an internal force. The result is a commanding presence, no better exemplified than in Forbidden Island. As noted by Barry Schwabsky, “These paintings don’t exactly come out to meet you halfway, but in their own subtle way they do approach you; they ever so slightly bend themselves to the form of your visual field… Gorchov invented a new convention for painting, a convention that relaces the flat rectangle with a curved surface, at once concave and convex, and thus a new way for painting to accommodate its viewer into a spatial, visual world.” (Barry Schwabsky, “Lucky Painter,” in Exh. Cat., New York, Cheim & Read, Ron Gorchov: The Last Paintings 2017-2020, September – December 2021, p. 7)
Forbidden Island fuses abstract forms with pulsating color to create an imaginative and immersive landscape that brings into question one’s relationship with the painted surface, creating a phenomenological experience that immerses viewer in a vivid and emotionally charged world of abstraction. Drawn inwards by the indefatigable pull of the concave surface, the eye is simultaneously drawn to either side of the vast canvas, taking in as much of the carefully crafted composition as possible. The pigment dances gesturally across the surface, dripping and racing across the surface as influenced by gravity, lending an extraordinary dynamism to the work.