During the 12 years that John Torreano used glass jewels in his paintings their role evolved from a collaborative to a dominant one. First employed as specific sources of light within painted fields, they gradually became the entire encrusted, sparkling surfaces of his works. Over time Torreano developed a kind of ersatz pointillism, one that incorporated the obligatory fragmentary marks of painted color but relied for the most part on the faceted planes of the jewels and their pigmentation for an optical mix in the pictures. In choosing jewels as a material he created for his work an a priori physical condition that almost predetermined style, much as Richard Artschwager’s paintings on Celotex begin with the swirls and patterns imprinted on their surfaces for their alternate allusions to and denials of expressionist brushing.
The outdoor sculpture Torreano made for last year’s Wave Hill Show was a galaxy of painted-steel and wooden jewels seemingly scattered down a hillside, all beveled edges and about three feet high. These foretold a new direction in his work (since more sculpture seemed likely), as well as a different treatment of the jewel as content and signifier. No longer the principal medium, the jewel itself was becoming Torreano’s subject—the sculptures were first of all volumetric portraits. That these new paintings (many on view as the September show at Hamilton Gallery) are further elaborations of that idea is therefore not wholly unexpected, even if the style in which they are rendered is.
The gems, isolated on primed white grounds in the earlier and smaller canvases, are yellow “sapphires,” a green “emerald,” purple “amethysts,” and yellow-brown “topazes.” Thin applications of color locate the jewel, while painted black lines, cartoonlike, establish its features, configuring the cuts and planes and giving it mass. In these smaller paintings the jewels are sitting for portraits which heighten all their best points—clarity of tone, the good lines of their oval, diamond, and step cuts. They are solemnly preposterous illustrations of illusions, both physical and metaphysical. As the paintings grow larger (the biggest and most recent being 8 feet square) the treatment grows more impressionistic, less defined. White highlights appear, lending perspective, as the black lines become more and more sporadic, disappearing altogether in the last painting. The least descriptive of them all, it portrays platonically gray gems up close, in a very intent but slightly out-of-focus inspection.
Torreano’s commitment to abstraction was noteworthy, both for how long it lasted and for the plastic permutations he contrived on a two-dimensional surface. Almost alone among his peers, artists now in their early forties many of whose styles evolved from a pointillist-derived technique, his imagery (although sometimes generated by stellar maps) did not read literally. For all its representational qualities this new work may not either.
—Richard Armstrong
