My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 77

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Around 1987, in the midst of an
eight-year period (1984-92) when he
was dividing his time between the u.s.
and France, Norton made a definitive
shift to painting per se, producing
at first grotesque (though comically
bright and squiggly) fantasy creatures
tumbled together in quasi-patterned
arrangements against placeless
monochrome backgrounds. The forms,
hues, and compositions bore a kinship
to those of the CoBrA movement,
Peter Saul, the Chicago Imagists, and
the French artists Robert Combas
and Herve Di Rosa. This was, after all,
the era of East Village recklessness.
Yet a structural regularity, angular
and geometric, persisted in Norton’s
two-dimensional works, implying that
his sculptures were, in effect, still there
under the more organic (and orgasmic)
overlays of painterly figuration. It was
as if the abstract structure of Indian
Space Painting — an overtly American
synthesis of Cubism and Surrealism
practiced in the 1940s and ’50s by artists
such as Howard Daum, Gertrude
Barrer, Steve Wheeler, Will Barnet,
Peter Busa, and Robert Barrell — had
been infused with the psychedelic
impulses of the Vietnam War era.
That ability to embrace contraries,
holding them simultaneously in dynamic
equipoise, has remained a signature
feature of Norton’s art up to the present
day. In the 1990s and early 2000s,
when his palette was dominated by
blue, white, and black, he tended to
create visual zones — some populated
by rectilinear shapes, some by circles
and curves — asymmetrically balanced
like equally important but largely
segregated realms of cognition and
feeling (After the Fact, 2001-02). In
these works, anxiety is contemplated as
a theme and at the same time actively
experienced by both artist and viewer.
The images convey an existential anxiety
of choice, where every option selected
entails the loss of its equally attractive
(and equally troublesome) alternative.
Vacillation or stasis seem to be the only
responses possible within this locked,
internally churning, visual universe.