Meditations on Space: Joseph Ablow

These days, a true artist’s artist is hard to find. Among the latest photo-fabric-shrapnel assemblages and “conceptual” curves-and-stripes fads that populate today’s modern art galleries, the artist who strives after the time-honored nature of shadow, shape and color is a rarity.

Joseph Ablow can be described as such an artist. A Boston native and Professor of Fine Arts at Boston University for 20 years, Ablow has, for much of his career, devoted himself to the still life, finding in simple objects—the bowl, the cloth, the tableboth—the abstract and the specific. Ablow’s show of “Recent Paintings” at the Pucker Gallery in Boston is a testament both to his innovation and his artistic stamina.

Ablow’s subject matter is deceptively simple: collections of open jars and pitchers rest innocuously on top of non-descript tables. The visual confection normally found in still lifes—reflective sparkles on glass, pastel groups of flowers or dew on fruit—is nowhere to be found. Instead objects are simplified into flat shapes. A cup is represented through the simple shape of a cylinder rimmed with shadow, while a drape of fabric becomes little more than a hard-edged line.

“The work I’m doing here is a pure geometric matter,” Ablow says. “I am mainly concerned with the character of the objects and their relationships. They are very ordinary things, but I invent the order to put on them. There is nothing very impressive about them, but as they are set on the table, they take on a certain gravitas.”

In this sense, Ablow’s work most resembles that of Giorgio Morandi in the 1940s and 1950s. Morandi, called the father of the contemporary still life, relentlessly painted the same enamel bottles and china bowls for decades, using a palette that never wandered more than a shade away from gray. Like Morandi, Ablow is concerned with exploiting a pictorial brand of truth, discovering something universal in the shape of insipid junk.

From the tin box to the ceramic jar, Ablow always targets similar subject matter, and often from memory. Although Ablow says most of his work is purely visual, with no aspirations to greater social or metaphysical meaning, his objects sometimes assume a more personal significance. In “Waiting,” which was conceived as a memento mori for a dead friend, a ponderous swath of fabric slumps above a somber procession of empty cobalt cups.

The structure of Ablow’s paintings is far from haphazard. Each painting is deliberately structured and painstakingly worked and reworked, giving it an architectural quality. In works like “Rhymes” and “Markers,” the shadowed bowls form a visual cadence of repeated circles and jagged triangles, while the negative space is carefully framed to act as a balancing counterweight.

Ablow cites artists Fra Angelico and Piero as some of his greatest influences, and one can feel the quiet and stable Italian Renaissance sensibilities at work in his paintings. However, Ablow’s paintings are not all serene harmony and immaculate balance. There is a considerable amount of distortion and tension as well: tabletops swerve away from the horizon, cups tip up against the laws of perspective, and drapes fall in completely unnatural ways. In “Studio Dialogue” a jar is partially-hidden, as its left side has no visible correlation with its asymmetrical right counterpart.

Like Cézanne, Ablow toys with the construction of space. Ablow paints objects on the brink of chaos and objects that appear as if they could collapse on themselves any moment. Coupled with their stability, this tension is what brings the viewer back, spell-bound, to Ablow’s work.

The most striking development in Ablow's recent work is in its unorthodox, ethereal color. While his previous works were mostly painted in shades of chalky beige and rose with a careful accumulation of paint layers, (a derivative of the direct color technique he learned from Oskar Kokoschka), these paintings glow with blues worthy of Picasso’s Blue Period and warm coppers worthy of Georgia O’Keefe’s canyons. In works like “The Mantle” and “Tuscan Shadows” Ablow’s objects are suffused with a ghostly iridescence. The color in the smaller gouaches, however, is not as successful, and the glaring colors sometimes clash in a muddy jumble.

Ablow turned to painting still lifes after early unsuccessful bouts with epic scenes of Greek mythology. After receiving his M.A. in Art History at Harvard in 1955, painting still lifes offered him the attraction of “studying the visible world within a controlled and concentrated situation.” Ablow also said that painting still lifes offered, “the possibility of problems with clearly defined solutions.”

Once involved in his new project, however, Ablow found that this view was an belittling over-simplification. “Because the objects are inanimate does not mean they are still, and because the objects have been arranged by the artist it does not ensure his control over the world they become,” Ablow said, “What was to have been for me a subject only for study, became an engulfing involvement with a world that, for all its stillness, was elusive, mysterious and open.”

Joseph Ablow’s “Recent Paintings” will be on view at the Pucker Gallery (171 Newbury Street, Boston) through May 23. For more information, please see www.puckergallery.com.