COMMUNITY Arts & Music “In 1972 when I started to use them, they were basically industrial marking sticks,” he recalls. McArthur Binion effectively converts an elementary tool into a refined hand-held instrument. He thrives in the effort of that conversion, having developed an ornate and labored approach that demands strenuous hours, and— as Binion has noted—resonates with the cotton-picking of his childhood. He had to train himself to be ambidextrous to negotiate hand fatigue, and works an entire surface of a painting in one sitting, before returning to rework that surface the next day or week or month. Some works take years to complete. Depending on how long he lets the paint dry, it becomes more or less malleable, responding to his hand like pigmented, sculptural putty. What results is a mash-up of pointillism. “The part I took from Minimalism is that you want to do your own stuff in your own image,” Binion says in the release for this show, and this is what he always did, as one can see in the exhaustive yet delicate marks of Icicle: Juice from 1976, which emanate an uncanny shimmer. Small works like MAB: 1971: VIII, 2015, almost naively ram a puzzle of Binion’s portrait ID photos (the kind we all know and don’t necessarily love) directly up against the artist’s overlaid lines of oil bar, but the outcome is phenomenal. Binion’s work isn’t specifically race-related, but the pictures of the artist in his youth (with rounded afro) take stock of unaccounted for signifiers that collapse into his own particular story. Lar Painting: also sideswipe racial connotation with color as racial terminology while also ratcheting up the artist’ litany fr underpainting to Jasper John’ shifting avalanche of cr marks. Like many successful artists that fit cr oppositions: line and shape, figure and ground, image and abstraction, copy and original, color and black & white. His modus operandi is to somehow magically blend an assault of binaries into a single, unified emblem of the unique and complicated self. McArthur Binion’s work has been featured in exhibitions at numerous galleries and institutions including the following solo exhibitions: Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA McArthur Binion: Seasons (2016); Galerie Lelong, New York, USA McArthur Binion: Re: Mine (2015); and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, USA
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