In an earlier painting, Untitled X, we saw the use of lines at the very edge of the painting, giving us a hint of framing. Here, in Untitled XII, the frame idea comes through as if it were the key to interpreting this painting.
We’ve just looked at twelve works by this artist. I posted them in succession and with such haste in an attempt to simulate a gallery experience. When you see a solo show in a gallery you go from one piece to the next, you look close, you stand way back, you circle around, and you go back to something you saw earlier. You try to get a feeling for how this artist’s mind and imagination work.
Notice that in Untitled XII the “frame” is not complete. Not only is it conspicuously broken, but it waves in and out of the other elements. Whereas in previous paintings, the crisp lines were placed on a field of undulating, bulging colors and we could talk about “background,” here background and foreground are interacting. The “frame” is not separate from or placed on top of anything. It is simply another element in the painting.
Think of a painting as a conversation. You, the viewer, are half of the conversation. How you frame the conversation determines what you hear/see.
Magritte comes to mind. His paintings, as all humor, rely on framing or 
context. Here the frame or context is a neat, bourgeois living room, which sets up certain expectations and assumptions. A model locomotive mounted into a fire place would be jarring enough, but a locomotive moving outward from a fireplace—notice the smoke—is beyond all your assumptions about what’s possible. You can only take comfort from the realization that you are looking at a constructed image and not a real locomotive in a real fire place. Small comfort! You immediately realize that you love looking at this and that this was Magritte’s intention. You’re trapped, looking at something that you don’t understand. Sounds like the beginning of doubt and Cartesian introspection. Congratulations, you’re modern.
A Magritte painting has one joke in it. Once you get it, it pretty much comes to rest.
In Boyer’s Untitled XII you may see a bird or a face, but only fleetingly. The wit in a Boyer painting keeps ricocheting in your brain.
Painting by Bruce Hatton Boyer, oil on canvas, 40” x 30”
http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/magritte-mystery-ordinary-1926-1938
Rene Magritte, 1898-1967
Bruce Hatton Boyer is the author of:
The Solstice Cypher, 1979
The Natural History of the Field Museum: Exploring the Earth and its People, 1993
The Miniature Rooms: the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2004
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/black-dot-anthropocentrism/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/untitled-ii-stretch/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/untitled-iii-rack/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/untitled-iv-asperatus-clouds/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/untitled-v-blue-rectangle/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/untitled-vi-back-and-forth/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/untitled-vii/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/untitled-viii/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/untitled-ix/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/untitled-x/
https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/untitled-xi/
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 