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 indi-
vidual 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.