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Showing posts from June, 2009

John Cronin - New Paintings - Green On Red Gallery - 2009

John Cronin - Palinode - Green On Red Gallery - 2005

Modernist Painting Redivivus: John Cronin’s Abstractions by Donald Kuspit New York 2005 John Cronin’s paintings are profoundly beautiful: their vibrant, sensual surfaces, composed of ingeniously nuanced brushstokes, seemingly illuminated from within, have the “sensate-objectivity of beauty” that is the aesthetic core of art, as the philosopher Alexander Baumgarten argued. The illusion of inner light, giving the flat painting an inexplicable depth, has its source in the smooth, radiant aluminium planes underneath the paint as well as the outer light they seem to absorb and dissemble. Cronin’s colors appear to reflect light even as they are suffused with it. Veiled and filtered by the atmospheric color, the subtly intense light shines with revelatory promise. Cronin’s paintings are visual epiphanies: tours de force of perceptually “living form,” to use the poet Friedrich Schiller’s phrase. They in fact have a peculiarly poetic format: the broad, linear brushst