[Dialogue Magazine, Columbus, OH, May-June, 1990]
John Moore at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art
Willem DeKooning, talking about his own Women paintings of the early 1950’s, said it plainly: “I
don’t think artists have particularly bright ideas.” Very often, in fact, painters get hooked on a
downright silly idea, and show no signs of fatigue as they bat it around for decades. But good work
is frequently produced in just this way. A dumb excuse, that keeps the work moving, can be worth
its weight in inspiration.
Former Cleveland artist John L. Moore, transplanted to New York since 1985, has stuck to his
guns for the better part of twenty years, belaboring a cast of geometric forms in a highly stagey,
painterly world. Not exactly dumb, by art world standards, but other Cleveland artists (Ginna Brand,
Patrick Kelly) were doing somewhat similar things in the late 1970”s, and have since moved in
different direction s. Moore perseveres.
Some painters have a ‘vocabulary’ of forms, but Moore’s damaged geometries are more like a
cast a players, interacting in spaces suggestive of landscape. Pillar or curtain-like areas are often
present, cutting off the ‘view’. Moore refers to his works as baroque, perhaps with these features in
mind, and perhaps because of an uneasy equilibrium in his paintings, between artifice,
fragmentation, and looming natural forces. There is an over-all sense of wary anticipation,
augmented by Moore’s crepuscular palette, applied variously in brushy and hard-edged
techniques.
In paintings prior to 1985, sections of earth cut across slices of sky or water, and outmoded
ideas of order, of landscape, architecture, drapery – linger on the canvas. Sweeping arcs are
deployed, black triangles push through rising, wave-like blue areas. But the dynamics are stilled as
all significant movement becomes contained within Moore’s painterly shards, bound up at their
borders, or trapped in interior textures.
There is a stolid serenity, a love of the status quo in Moore’s earlier work – a relative calm,
which is under attack by paint (playing itself) as either a hostile element, or one suspiciously
congenial, pelting down on a god-forsaken triangle, or warming the horizon of a gibbous polygon.
One of the things Moore seems to portray is repression. Everything blocks everything else.
When doors do open (as in his last Cleveland painting, Hessler Street) they open onto flood, or
thin air, or nothingness. Much of Moore’s imagery derives from boyhood explorations around Doan’
s Creek on Cleveland’s east side. The Creek runs from the suburbs to Lake Erie, by way of the
Cleveland Museum of Artt and Rockefeller Park. It’s sort of a spirit road, surrounded by the city.
Part of its course is through Lake View Cemetery, where it is interrupted and dwarfed by an
outsized damn. This overstatement of repressive means has also entered Moore’s imagery.
Perhaps it is a phase of freedom, rather than repression, that Moore sketches. Whatever gets
through the cracks is the real thing.
Moore’s progress since his moved to New York can be traced in the evolution of his black
configurations. At first, angled shapes tower near the center of the canvas. Truncated, block-like,
they have been compared to Richard Serra’s obstructive sculptures. In Cabrini No-No’s, the Don’t
Ask Questions paintings, and in Bill the black has gradually become circular, and has multiplied,
clumping and floating. There is a sense of wholeness and homogeneity and doom about these
black players. They come onstage as they are, a whimsical invasion, impervious to manipulation or
division.
An aloofness about Moore’s Cleveland paintings keeps any interrogation, critical or emotional,
at a distance. It is self-involved work, seemingly caught up in subtleties of expression that are part
of a slow internal dialogue, about facades and personas, risk and safety.
Danger and freedom are the subjects that emerge in the New York paintings. They are more
abstract, or abstracted, and are still remote in tone. But there is an animism about the new black
“characters,” a quality of deus-ex-machina about their functioning, that lends a new unpredictability
and promise to Moore’s explorations.