McArthur Binion
McArthur Binion was born on September 1, 1946, in Noxubee County in Mississippi. His father, Russell Earl Binion, age thirty-one at the time of his birth, worked in “industry,” and his mother, Martha Binion, was twenty-six. All this information is available on the artist’s birth certificate, of which he has made multiple copies, arranging these into grids and using them as the substratum for repeating modules of gestural strokes. The works represent what Lawrence Alloway called systemic painting, with an expressionistic edginess. The document features handwriting that is neat, impersonal, indifferent—it is an official, routinely matter-of-fact record of a local event. This cool bureaucratic detachment contrasts with Binion’s strokes, which, while neatly parallel, and always vertically or horizontally oriented in the modules, have an idiosyncratic intensity, like that of a slashing saber. The works’ dual tendencies are at odds even as they are forced together; they don’t quite integrate, making for a discomfiting friction.
The oil-paint-stick strokes are sometimes colorful—generally red, yellow, or green—but are mostly black. There are also elements of white and gray, sometimes both at once. DNA: Black Painting I (all works 2015), for instance, is a large square divided into four vertical fields of varying shades of gray that are themselves divided into the smaller square modules. This composition seems to stand on a thin border composed of yellow, blue, and red rectangular units. Some works are comparatively small “sketches,” as Binion calls them, but all have a finished, “composed” look, however “decomposed” their tactile surfaces seem. And in all the pieces, crosses seem to magically and repeatedly emerge from the overall mosaiclike pattern, suggesting a “visionary” subtext to the works. In dna: black painting XIX, a large grayish-white rectangle “miraculously” appears in the black grid, tilted the same way as the confrontational white square in Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, and with the same sense of hallucinatory verisimilitude.
Pages from Binion’s address book form the underpinning (“under-matter” or “under-content”) in a second category of work, while a third, the series “MAB: 1971”—Binion’s initials—features a photograph of the artist taken on the year of the title, when he was twenty-five. This series involves a smaller square—15 x 15 inches—with the photographic self-portrait sometimes almost completely hidden, and with a wide range of color. Usually brighter and more startling, these works seem to erupt in your face.
Binion is clearly a master abstract painter, successfully integrating abstraction’s geometric and gestural extremes—the grid and the painterly “signature.” But he is not a purist; that is, he uses line and color not for their own sake but in the service of personal memory and history. His birth certificate and the pages from his address book are like accretions of Proustian madeleines, not remembrances of things past, but catalogues of their mnemonic traces.