My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 78

k
Worth th Wait, 2009-2010
Diptych, Acrylic on linen
103 x 126 inches

o
Slow Smolder, 2010
Private Collection
52 x 63 inches

Compartmentalization cannot last —
so at least the voices of good mental
health advise us. Thankfully, for
reasons that are not entirely clear (least
of all to the artist himself ), the log jam
finally broke. Previously, Norton had
devoted much studio time to working
and reworking old canvases, often
winning a kind of forced liberation of
the gestural curves. In the early 2000s,
one saw those rounded shapes breaking
out of their former constraints, invading
larger and larger portions of the field
(Milton and John, 2002-03). Yet the
colors remain cool and limited, tending
to somberness. Anyone who has had a
dark night of the soul is likely to feel
the intense anguish of these works, and
to fear a bit for their author.

Then, suddenly, something quite
splendid happened, affecting this
viewer and others with force. Revisiting
Norton’s studio in 2008 after a longish
absence, I was greeted by a new world
of color. “What a wallop!” I blurted in
front of the first work I saw, a phrase
that subsequently became its title.
Some 12½ feet wide by 7½ feet high,
featuring vertical strips of bright yellow
stippled with green, white, red, and
pink, the diptych pushes its picture
plane forward like a caution sign that
has tossed caution aside, proclaiming
instead a new order of pleasure and
happiness. The effect of the painting —
bold as Pop art but completely
abstract — was shared by several other
canvasses in the room and by many
more soon to come. My exclamation
echoed, I believe, the implicit battle
cry of this newest, most accomplished
phase of the artist’s career.

This is not to say that the paintings
Norton has made over the past decade
are simple in either construction or
meaning. Far from it. Ornette (2006),
named for the free jazz great Ornette
Coleman, is a broken field of seemingly
random forms and colors that somehow
mysteriously cohere, in the manner
of Coleman’s startling music. Works
like Einstein’s Edge of Winter (2009-11)
and Pink-E (2011), with their firmly
differentiated quarters, remind us that
paradigms or “frames of reference” are
as determinative in art as they are in
physics. Split Kick (2009-10) is partially
riddled with holes, Swiss cheese fashion,
revealing the linen beneath — one of
the lacunae grown large as a cartoon
thought-bubble, but blank and disclosing
nothing. Is this the Nothingness that
seemed to impend in the earlier “blue”
works? Apparently not, since similar
holes appear in many cheerily hued
pictures, such as Mr. Sweetheart (200910), Slow Smolder (2010) and, most
pointedly, Worth the Wait (2009-10)
— a work that is thoroughly upbea t
in both title and coloration, although
it duly notes the annoyance of
delayed gratification.

77

k
Mr Sweetheart, 2010
Acrylic on linen
63 x 103 inches

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

q
Split Kick, 2009-2010
Diptych, Acrylic on linen
103 x 126 inches