Editors note: re•dux has been extended to Dec. 9.
It was more than a new season. September arrived and with it, re•dux entered, Ron Linden’s bustling opening reception at Gallery 478 on a sun-drenched autumn day in San Pedro.
re•dux, as in a “revisiting,” is an appropriate name for two reasons. First, some of the works are older, starting from 2015, up to the present day. It’s a sizable exhibition with 17 works in total. But this revisiting also applies to Ron getting back to his life-long work after a serious bout with the coronavirus, which had him in the hospital for one month, earlier in 2023.
Originally from Chicago, Illinois, Ron is a California abstract painter, independent curator, and he was an associate professor of art at Los Angeles Harbor College, until he retired in 2020, at 80 years of age. After a semester of teaching art via remote classes during the pandemic, he said he could not consider the prospect of teaching visual art remotely once again.
Ron was director of LAHC fine arts gallery from 2000-2021 and Warschaw Gallery in San Pedro from 2005 to 2015. In 2009, he founded TransVagrant, a curious collective of artists and arts advocates to produce exhibitions and performances at various locations.
Ron received his Bachelor of Fine Art and Masters in Fine Art at the University of Illinois. In 1972 he relocated to California, where worked as a scenic artist in the Hollywood film industry for 25 years. During this time he helped establish artist communities in Pasadena, downtown Los Angeles and San Pedro.
Art critic Mat Gleason wrote that Ron’s gallery specialized in rigorous, almost scholarly shows. He called TransVagrant/Warschaw “one of the crowning achievements of the South Bay, inspiring and informing the whole scene.”
Artworks
During his opening reception, Ron discussed his series of 12” square works (graphite, charcoal, acrylic, canvas) titled Reboot, which is exactly what the series was for him. He was first getting back into painting after recovering from a “horrifying” experience, which, happily, he remembers nothing about. After leaving the hospital he had a good amount of rehab to do.
“At a certain point, I thought, ‘well, I wonder if my hand and eye are on the same page?’” said Ron. “So, I bought those small canvases and began with no preconceived notion of what I was going to paint or draw. But the first few of them wound up looking like heads. A couple of them were based on a stencil of a haberdasher’s dummies, the head that they put hats on. And one of my pals said, ‘Oh, you’re doing portraits.’ That stuck in my head and I just went ahead with that.”
Indeed, Ron found his hand and eye were still on the same page. He was worried because in drawing and painting, he noted, it’s important how your mechanics are. He also discovered then that he could stand and lean into a drafting table, where he could work on pieces up to 30 inches. Encouraged, Ron is again approaching larger formats where he feels more comfortable.
“I had an oddly rewarding time with those head studies that make up that series,” Ron said.
The selection for re•dux wasn’t about dates or chronology, it was about what paintings live together, “a visual decision all the way.”
Redeye (charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 2023) is one of Ron’s newest works; he called it a funny painting.
“It takes a while to find those beady little substitutes for eyes that are lingering behind the frames,” he said.
A playful piece that embodies movement, the detail of those “beady little substitutes” are at once haunting and humorous. With Redeye, (charcoal, acrylic on canvas, 2023) Ron had a shuffle on his mind. He took stencils that he cut like a ellipse (a sort of crescent) — the cutout from a vintage oval picture frame that your grandparents, or great-grandparents were posed in. He splayed out the cut stencils like playing cards and underneath the “cards” lies an opening, in the same shape.
“Implying that’s where they’ll fall to or end up,” Ron said. “A couple of [the cards] that are rendered as eyes are surveying the situation or looking out. So, that’s the fun part of it really.”
Another exceptional work, Friday, Late (acrylic on canvas, 2018) was created from cut up collage, in which Ron often works. He described its color as a nice contemplative gray. Its triangle shadow in the upper right corner is an important part of the piece to him. It rather veils the paintings’ geometric semicircles and earthy shades of black, brown and hint of gold, uniting into a coherent seductiveness. To highlight all of this, a luxurious trio of dense, black, feather-shaped edges peek from its axis amid intersected spheres, with what could be a cubic heart, in gold, in its center. Friday, Late is a very satisfying painting.
“Clown Time 1 (charcoal, acrylic on canvas, 2020) is hilarious,” Ron said “It’s like a send up of formalism, taking all the mechanics of geometric abstractionism and turning them inside out.”
The playful piece juxtaposes surprising tongue-like forms that emerge, jut and wag, supported by the mechanics of structure, existing all together inside individual gray-brown 3D frames like satirical cartoon panels.
Having lived with some of these paintings for several years, to show them now — some for the first time and some again — it’s curious how Ron would sum up re•dux, emotionally. But of course, the artist’s answer was about the work itself.
“I don’t have any emotional attachment to the exhibition itself, but I’ve always said … that my goal is to try and make an image that is so fetching that you’re going to want to get into it on first look,” Ron said. “And the most important part is staying with it, for the secondary or tertiary read. I want the paintings to yield something more than that initial impression.”
Ron said he tries to explain to students the first response, that emotional response, where you look at something and you’re attracted to it before your brain rationalizes why you’re attracted to it — that is a good definition of the aesthetic response.
“I hope that these paintings work in that way, that there is a little bit of work to be done after the initial attraction of the image,” Ron said. “Because there is a sense of humor in a lot of it. It’s important to have a sense of humor.”
Speaking of humor, Ron shared a poem by John Berryman, Life, Friends, is Boring. He noted it has a sense of humor but it’s morbid. He said Berryman was a great poet and teacher who was so particular that his students would say he could arrange the same words [from a poem] in a different order in the same sentence or verse and, “bing, it happened,” Ron said.
That “bing” he explained is Berryman’s magic over the mastery of language. He could look at a poem, not take anything out but rearrange it and like magic, it happened.
“I take those things seriously as a painter too,” Ron said. “Painting has a language of its own, obviously. But I’ve also said in the past, when I’m cornered about it, that I’m as inspired by what I read as by what I see. … If I could ever make a painting as succinct as that Berryman poem, I’d be a very happy guy.”
Ron posited, maybe that’s the kind of thing that painters look for all the time — “to have that quotient of enunciation where you couldn’t be done, less or more,” he said.
In other words, a quotient is nothing more than dividing a thing until you get the best result of expression (kind of like writing) to where it’s so clear, “it just works,” said Ron.
With humility, Ron made an observation about his opening reception.
“I feel good about having this exhibition here at Gallery 478,” he said. “You know how they say in sports, when somebody sets a record … and they call it their personal best? Well, that’s how I felt.”
After accounting only for the people that he and “478” gallerist Arnee Carofano knew who attended, Ron received a great showing of about 71 guests.
“That’s a new personal best, a new record … here,” Ron said. “And [I got] a lot of interesting comments. I’m blessed with having a lot of gifted and smart friends. Even though I couldn’t spend a real amount of time with any one person, there was still a lot of interesting feedback. That’s important to me.”
Gallery 478
Ron credited Arnee for inspiring this exhibition. For a while she’d been telling Ron that she wanted to reestablish Gallery 478, because it had been dark for so long, since the pandemic. She asked Ron to be the first artist to restart the gallery. He had reservations initially because he’s been so connected to the gallery, curating shows and other things with both Arnee and her husband, photographer Ray Carofano. But Arnee persisted and “up it went.”
Ron noted, he’s been talking with Arnee and in terms of reopening, he knows artists who would also make keen curators. Gallery 478 is a very accommodating space, he said. It has shown sculptural work, larger works and it’s good for photography and smaller works.
“So we can look forward to some unanticipated work by younger people,” he said. “I did shows with students I had at Harbor College that were extremely gifted. “I’m glad Arnee feels that way [and] that’s good for all of us,” Ron said.
re•dux
Time: 4 to 7 p.m., closing reception and artist talk, Dec. 9
Cost: Free
Details: Call for appointment, 310-600-4873
Venue: TransVagrant + Gallery 478, 478 W. 7th St., San Pedro