Paul Wonner’s precisely articulated pictures have grown, in the artist’s words, “out of . . . interest and pleasure in 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings.” Yet, while many of the things of Dutch genre scenes are present in these works, theirs is a stillness without charm or intimacy, rendered in a hard, bright, resolutely contemporary light.
To Flora, 1985, is paradigmatic of Wonner’s sensibility. Within a bare interior space, the floor a virtually uninflected neutral gray, the rear wall nearly black, a great many containers of flowers have been placed. They surround an antique wooden table (the room’s only furniture) on which rest some pansies in a small white glass vase, a sharpened pencil, and an upright hardcover book opened to a page showing a reproduction of one of Rembrandt’s two portraits of his wife, Saskia, as Flora. All of the different flower arrangements function as so many separate still lifes within the picture: sweet william, lacy tulips, and a sprig of carnation placed in an olive-green plastic pail; bachelor’s buttons in a paper-wrapped bouquet; a lavish pink orchid set in a tonic-water bottle; the bloom of a dandelion seen against the shadow of a nearby rose; even two postcards of well-known floral still lifes. A few symbols of the garden and studio appear here and there: clippers decorated with a single scarlet petal; a yellow pencil whose horizontal length is divided in half by a vertical stem of rose of sharon rising in front of it from a green beer bottle; a garden fork whose handle lies on a blank sheet of drawing paper; and on that same sheet of drawing paper, a scrap of green paper bearing the artist’s signature.
All of these things are arrayed as if they had just been called together for some pictorial reveille. Sharing the space of the painting, this multitude of subjects gives off an air of laboratory isolation. It is a work both masterful and perverse, so filled with art-historical conceits and floral iconography that it becomes a cacophony of references. Lost in this virtuosic exercise is the compositional unity and narrative suggestion that are so much a part of the Dutch painting Wonner claims to honor. Another, subtler loss is the softening chiaroscuro, the modest gloom of the 17th century. Wonner’s crisp, exact renderings are faithful to the clean California light by which he paints (Wonner lives and works in San Francisco), but that light declares itself boldly, giving to shadows the same hard edges as the objects themselves. The result is an obsessive accretion of details but a scarcity of compassionate nuance.
A dreadful sophistication is present in much of Wonner’s work. Instead of one “story,” we are presented with a visual clamor of contradictory tales. Wonner is an artist who knows too much, and the burden of that knowledge can be seen in this melancholy display.
—Buzz Spector
