Offer ends soon!, Jim Doiron

In certain ways, Jim Doiron’s paintings resemble old barns or warehouses. Worn and weathered, pocked by the inevitabilities of time, they look as if cut from the painted advertisements that once covered the sides of buildings set along the rural roads of America. Figures, forms, and fonts all reach outward, inviting us to hazard a guess about their original contexts and purposes. Separated and set apart, these points of access to places and things long gone draw us into a constant loop of things made and remade, built and destroyed, partial and whole.

But Doiron’s objects are deceptive. They are not the nostalgia-laden Americana interred in the graveyards of antique row. Rather they are artifacts of contemporary life, often literally cut from construction sites, reforming architecture into art, if such a distinction is even credible. A wall once marked by the sediment and wear of years of occupancy now hangs on another, as much an echo as an excision. What was once covered, declared unworthy of notice and left to obscurity, asserts itself as an agent of meditative absorption, a delicate palimpsest.

If there is such a thing as an assisted automatism, these works are its manifestations. Iconographically they are dependent upon their previous circumstance and their compositions are contingent upon designs already drawn and damage already endured. First, there is the decision to take, then a submission to the form of the chosen object. Finally, and divergently, come subtle manipulations—engraving, sanding, the addition and removal of paint and texture. Subtle, but luxurious. Languorous indulgences in materials that are otherwise marked solely by distress.

These interventions are noticeable only through prolonged and proximate observation, through a visual engagement with the physical processes of making, unmaking, and remaking. With this slow, sequential unfolding, Doiron’s works become weighted with their own histories, with their evocation of places and persons since lost, and with the webs of associations generated by fragments and allusions. They are thus returned to their original history, so that we may see them removed from it and given another. And then, by virtue of our looking, another.

For more information on the Artist got to: http://www.saatchionline.com/art/view/artist/155501/art/89182