JIM RAGLIONE'S NOT SIMPLY
MATERIAL WORLD
Jim Raglione’s work explores, both humorously and profoundly, a number of interwoven mysteries, like the interplay between conceptual and lived experience, and the flow of energy through nature’s raw materials—first into useful products, and ultimately into expressive, spiritual, philosophical works. His deceptively humble surfaces and explorations of elemental materials, scale, site, and spans of time reveal a rigorous and expressive intelligence. By moving from medium to medium he asserts his relation to art not only as a method of production but also as a way of being in, and seeing through, the world of tangible things.
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James Raglione was born in Portland, Oregon in 1954. He studied under Mel Katz at Portland State University and graduated in 1979 with a B.S in Painting. In late 1980, Raglione moved to New York City, where he was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1986. For the past two decades he has divided his time between Manhattan and Upstate New York.
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In 2009 he started his ”Fuel” series—large watercolor-on-rag-paper “portraits” of firewood. Floating on the page, the rough-hewn, heavy-looking fire logs seem paradoxically buoyed up by the emptiness around them. Hung in groups, the differences, startling or subtle, between these images of doomed entities evoke the emergence of individual character and vitality, not to mention the strangeness of our inclination to perceive such things where they don’t exist.
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The Fuel series consolidates a number of themes and motifs that Raglione has engaged over the decades. A series of small oils from the Eighties, for example, showed a similar interest in negative space and liminal shapes. Large outdoor sculptures of the Nineties and Aughts embody his fascination with wood’s versatility as well as its potential to combust or decay. “Potlatch,” one of these stacks of repurposed construction debris and logs, is in the permanent (so to speak) collection of the Lookout Sculpture Park in Lookout, PA. A lyrical series of tree-image etchings from the Mid-Nineties likewise explores the riparian flow between creativity, constructive work and entropy.
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In addition to paintings and sculptures shown by The Michael Klein Gallery, Raglione produced numerous simulacra in the Eighties, most notably, a series of copper plumbing-pipe “chairs” designed to unsettle and provoke the body rather than accommodate it. Many of these not-exactly-chair pieces showed at the Annie Plumb Gallery (once Manhattan Art) and three were included in the book “397 Chairs,” sponsored by the Architectural League of New York in 1988.
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Raglione’s interest in the quiddity of namable objects also persists. For three years, starting in the late 90s, he made at least one pinch-pot per day, dating each on the bottom. Although some of these arrays of cups have been fired—either in conventional or Japanese anagama kilns—all they are meant to contain is emptiness and the artist’s fingerprints. Similarly, clusters of wooden cubes painted in primary colors, are toys-but-not, interactive modules that viewers may rearrange (within the limits of their display space) to recall—without actually producing—the well-known “baby block” pattern, an optical illusion that shows up repeatedly in other of his works as a reminder of perception’s ability to make of the simplest elements puzzles no human mind can solve.
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