Oliver Vernon: Resurrection Man

A first joy

Oliver Vernon’s visionary new paintings tumble dancing from his canvases. They are bright celebrations of sensuality, ecstatic orgasms of pleasure and paint, lush actions of color and comfort. Must we suffer for our art? Let’s immerse ourselves instead into the hedonistic heaven of these floods of form. The paintings sing hallelujahs of freedom from the restraints of convention, in ecstatic chroma and happy hues. Rejoice in the freedom they offer! Enjoy them! What a verb, to enjoy, to enter into unified delight, to deliberately decide to indulge in celebration, to allow yourself to be overcome by pleasure. Disinterested interest, be gone to shady Hades, join all the lonely and moaning ghosts haunting the establishment’s faded museums of old modern art. Vernon’s euphoric paintings are bright visions of the present’s sensory experience. Rejoice!

Oliver Vernon, September 15, 2023

A second joy

Vernon is the product of a refreshing approach to making art which reduces the significance of the idea of an artist as a heroic and romantic individual of unique genius. Ever since Vernon began working in collaboration with Damon Soule, Mars-1 (Mario Martinez), David Choong Lee, and Nome Edonna as members of the Furtherrr collective, these artists have rejected the idea of being uniquely inspired, preferring to accept the group’s imagination as the guide to their imagery. They are still individuals, and each brings personal experience, and personal style to the group, but they are willing to gift their individuality to the group. In Furtherrr’s work, the hand of each artist becomes part of a whole – a Shiva of painting. Furtherrr’s collective paintings are a perfect expression of emergence, which is the zeitgeist of our time. Emergence – the idea that unpredictable things are born from complexity, rising up from disparate elements in new, unexpected forms. Emergence operates in the human species in the form of culture, which is a shared knowledge and wisdom which expresses something about homo sapiens which no individual member of our genus can.

Oliver Vernon, When to Fly

The members of Furtherrr have worked together for over a decade, somehow collaborating to produce some of the most seductive and interesting abstract paintings on the market. They meet at music festivals, and work for enthusiastic audiences of fans who enjoy watching the complex imagery emerge from broad strokes at the beginning of the work. A group effort, there is a constant back and forth between each artist’s gestures, and mutual tolerance is a necessity. The whole is more than each individual, and when the artists are in synch with each other, murmuration magic happens. The paintings share the same ecstatic exuberance as a flock of starlings, whose harmonious collective motion surges and flows through time and space, the group mind transcending the capacity of each individual.

“I’m absolutely influenced by working with Furtherrr,” Vernon said, “Working with the other guys in that group over the years, there’s been a way through osmosis of learning entirely new ways of working, of technique.” He pays homage to Mars-1’s beautiful work in particular, deeply appreciative of his influence. “That’s one of the ways my Clement Greenbergian philosophy was obliterated, by working with Mario (Mars-1). He had a way of handling paint that was a very traditional classical way, that I was absolutely opposed to, vigorously, for so many years. Over the years that’s become part of my natural painting sensitivity and how I develop improvisationally, an a la prima style of painting where I’m mixing wet on wet with a wide-open palette of colors, something I never did before the collaborative thing, but now it’s just part of my repertoire.”

Oliver Vernon, Billow

Successfully breaking free from the formal conventions of institutional art, the Furtherrr painters are the resurrection men of abstraction, restoring new life to a dead genre. Before Furtherrr, the brown stains of weary age deleted any freshness that once lingered over the formal abstractions of the twentieth century, and reduced them to a formulaic hell of hotel paintings fabricated for jaded decorators. Driven by the power and money of commercial exploitation, not by the love of the people, in the awful oughties and terrible teens of this century, abstract expressionism smelled like grandma’s wardrobe.

Furtherrr is a heroic collective effort to create a hive mind. The experience has powerfully affected Vernon’s personal work and made an indelible impact. He explained, “There was a painting we did at Symbiosis I absolutely fell in love with, because I had forgotten how good it was. There were a number of moves that I did on that painting that were really special, and I can’t believe that I did them in such a short amount of time, they were time-consuming paint jobs. But I came back to my studio after that show and I reproduced the moves that I did in that painting in a similar type of composition, wanting to create a similar type of space that only happens in our collabs – hard to me to create on my own, and then I went about executing that painting in the mindset of our collaborative experience, and I channeled a little bit of each of the artists as I was working and developing the imagery. I’ve never done another painting so based on our collaborative experience.”

Oliver Vernon, Counterpoint

A third joy.

Hyperbole notwithstanding, while Vernon’s paintings are a true appeal to solid pleasure, they are also a delicate balance of sensual experience and thought. They are founded upon his understanding of art history, and restore the missing metaphysic to abstraction that was once the heartbeat and pulse of paintings by its father, Wassily Kandinsky. And although Greenberg’s formalism was Vernon’s foundation, and his work with Furtherrr has led him to reject it, his work is still a response to the ideas promoted by the past century’s most prominent art propagandist, and he takes pleasure in the contradiction of keeping a foot in both worlds. “Clement Greenberg was very meaningful and impactful for me,” said Vernon, “I formed my whole reasoning for making art around a lot of what he spoke about painting not being referential and representative. I experience the complete opposites of life, and that’s another dichotomy. To completely reject and then also to accept it and to work within it with respect to how the abstract elements play on the surface and composition. It’s rejecting it and embracing it. Nothing is absolute for me. I experience one truth and also experience the opposing truth and accept both.”

Oliver Vernon, Maha

A New Yorker, Vernon has lived in the golden paradise of California’s Sierras for more than a decade, where he works in a large studio sheltered in the comfort of his home, immersed in the forest life of magic light, enjoying a good life among a community of gentle friends. This life has smoothed the spiky aggression of his earlier work – the kindness kindled in domestic comfort and natural serenity has calmed his ability to immerse himself fearlessly into the tumbling qualia of sense perception, which is his predominant interest. Some of his intimate and intricate drawings have taken years of work, but there is no sense of fatigue – these are labors of love, thoughtful expressions of his deep experiences of his visionary journeys. Collaboration has mellowed his experience, and the loving cup of collective inspiration has given him access to the expansive and emerging mind of culture. Joy!

Oliver Vernon is represented by the Chambers Project in Grass Valley, California, and by Lene Kirk Gallery in Albourg, Denmark.

For more on auctions, exhibitions, and current trends, visit our Magazine Page