Ron Griffin: Black and White Paintings

For twelve years, Los Angeles artist Ron Griffin has made paintings of paper objects. Junk, mostly. Wrappers and envelopes and crushed boxes and cellophane cigarette packaging picked up from the street. All rendered exactly. Despite their trompe l’oeil accomplishment, the paintings are more akin to abstraction than realism.

In 2000, Griffin exhibited a group of extraordinarily elegant paintings of individual white forms — toilet seat covers from public bathrooms — floating on black glossy surfaces. “The Black Paintings” were the culmination of Griffin’s Duchamp-ian practice of elevating the lowly through context. Two years later he exhibited a group of similarly executed paintings in which matte black surfaces were nearly entirely covered by the white forms. “The White Paintings” made reference to the work of Robert Ryman, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.

Griffin’s current work is based on found photographs, correspondence, and bureaucratic forms. Meticulously reproduced and veiled within painted file folders and vellum envelopes, the subjects take on the feeling of evidence. Homemade “girlie” photographs from the 1940’s, a fingerprint card from the ’60’s, and letters from convicts form a loose, seedy narrative. Griffin believes that film noir best captures the true personality of Los Angeles and the detritus he utilizes as source material for these paintings substantiates that theory.