My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | страница 79

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In Sidewinder (2010-11), a ladder-like
grid appears, suggesting a column of
high-rise windows perhaps, but also
hinting at a subtle return of the
repressed: the latticework of Norton’s
early sculpture. Its appearance is a tacit
acknowledgement of the space that has
otherwise been systematically withheld
from Norton’s paintings through a
deliberate refusal of perspective and
modeling. But, as Chinese painters
have long known, there are other ways
to evoke space — most deftly by
counterposing form with a vast
emptiness. A small boat drawn on a
blank expanse will seem suspended
in limitless depth and eternity. Such
juxtapositions may not always be
comforting — “the eternal silence of
these infinite spaces frightens me,”
Pascal said — but confronting the void,
even obliquely, is necessary to both
art and reason.
In short, an emotion-laden space
persists in Norton’s paintings, behind
the gapped peek-a-boo surfaces,
around their unmodulated forms.
In several of his most recent works,
Euclid (2012-13), Hot Enough to Melt
(2013) and many more, the empty
passages have gained almost equal
parity with the forms. Moreover, since
his breakthrough moment at the
turn of the millennium, Norton has
also been making sculpture again,
somewhat on the sly: familiar grid
forms in wood, hemp, and plaster;
tangled skeins of limp cord oddly
reminiscent of dripping paint.

For this artist, space itself — depth in
both the pictorial and psychological
sense — is tempting and ineradicable.
It is the compositional factor commonly
associated, in Western thought, with
deathly oblivion but also with the
passage of time and the kind of
traumas that no adult living in the art
world escapes: youthful indiscretions
and wanderings, intoxicants, volatile
relationships, professional frustrations,
divorce. Thus this work’s pictorial
dialogue between emptiness and form,
as constant as the inner duel of memory
and presence, remorse and hope.

Today, however, the painter is in a very
good place, enjoying financial security,
a stable and loving second marriage,
a well-earned facility in his work, and
the quiet respect of his artistic peers.
His more disturbing concerns center
now on political-economic chicanery
and environmental waste — the state
of the world rather than the state of
his soul. To judge from the painterly
emblems with which Norton currently
presents us, these grim social issues
remain, linen-like, in the background
and margins — undisguised and
undeniable, to be sure, but overridden
by a brightly joyous artistic life under
the sign of Matisse.