...through these hours light was flowing...

An Exhibit at The Nathan Cummings Foundation
December 8, 1998 - March 6, 1999

Fallen Willow, 1999, Oil on canvas 44.5" x 67"

About the Artist

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Where the Wall Meets the Ocean, 1998, Oil on canvas 430" x 72"

Environmental Art
Among the most vital trends in contemporary art to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, and ultimately the most important of them, is a broad direction generally called "environmental art." Building on issues pioneered by the mostly American practitioners of Land Art in the 1960s and 1970s and inspired by the environmental activism of the German artist Joseph Beuys, today's environmental artists show us the sharp specifics of place and the deep, far-reaching imprints of the human presence on it.

Friedman's Reverance Beyond Observation
The match between Jon R. Friedman, a painter in the landscape tradition, and the Cummings Foundation, a philanthropy that has strongly linked social and environmental justice in its mission, is a well-made one.

The How of Seeing
Friedman has chosen painting in a post-painting period. He works in the medium traditionally most concerned with the processes of visuality, and in a genre all but ignored by current art fashion. After the crisis of the advent of photography, after the dissolution and exclusion of the world, and most recently after the return to the world and to figuration, the subject of painting, it becomes clear, is finally not the paint itself but the adventure of vision: the act and the how of seeing, for the spectator as much as for the artist.

From the Paintings Back to the World
Looking at the world in Jon Friedman's paintings, we are sent back out to the world beyond the gallery, beyond the art world, to seek those places where the natural support seeps through the scrim of culture. We are charged with paying attention with noticing and valuing the slow dance of sky, light sun, trees, plants, land, water, rock. We are invited to ponder the net of underlying relations that constitutes the whole: the system of painted marks extends to the ecological system. Our dreary economic vision has been relieved, and that greater vision that relieves it points to a necessary revolution in sensibility and thought. In this way, Jon Friedman's work reminds us that landscape painting has a place within contemporary environmental art. What this direction of art offers is empowered vision, as a first step in a process that ends in change. In the meeting of the vision of this painter with the vision of this foundation, art continues its return to life.

Gene Ray
Curator of Exhibitions
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
Sarasota, Florida