In the last two decades, a purified picture has set in contemporary painting, in which form and color are subjected to a process of subtraction. The result is a drying up of the image that is imposed for suspension and lowering, becoming a sort of "shroud of painting". In Europe, the greatest creators of this "low profile" were Raoul De Keyser and Luc Tuyman: the artists have well interpreted the development of the nihilistic European society, painting dozens of works with "cataracts". But in the United States the minimalist and reductionist lesson has never divorced from physicality and happiness of color - as in the great lesson of Richard Tuttle - or in monumentality of the minimum terms, as in the sculptures of Joel Shapiro. The works of Ron Gorchov perfectly fit in this context because they possess, as in the best American tradition, a great stage presence, linked to a work by subtraction and repetition which now imposes itself in all its anticipatory strength. The artist has become, at the age of eighty-four, a real point of reference for the new generations with his works, suspended between two-dimensional and three-dimensional.
His wooden supports, shaped and curved, assault space with force, defining a topological space where the painter lays, with fresh and fast brushstrokes, simple and repeated shapes that take the value of Sinopia, both trace and imprint of an image. The color is applied with the freshness of the fresco, and with intensity and speed is able to convey a sense of modernity that displaces the less circumspect viewer. The two forms emerging from the color are the memory of the space between the arms and the body in ancient statues, an "absent" but essential space to define a body: a topological space that acts symbolically on our perception, as the shaping of the support evokes the stylization of a human bust.
Ron Gorchov stands out for consistency, anticipating the painting of this decade since the seventies, but only now, after the neo pop enthusiasm passed away, the artist is able to see his painting acclaimed worldwide.
