Palos Verdes Art Center / Beverly G. Alpay Center for Arts Education is pleased to announce The Look of Disquiet, a solo exhibition by San Pedro, CA abstract painter and curator, Ron Linden. The exhibition will open with an artist reception September 14th, six to nine p.m., and remain on view in the Norris and Welsh Galleries through November 16th.
I wind up where I wind up, more by reading than by looking, because of conundrums that are presented by authors. Whether they’re novelists, essayists or poets, they offer me something to build on and that is a pipeline into my brain that comes out in my hands.
~ Ron Linden
The Look of Disquiet takes its title from the 1935 novel The Book of Disquiet by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. This episodic and fragmented piece is one of many literary works from which San Pedro artist Ron Linden draws inspiration. Modernist writings by French phenomenologist Alain Robbe-Grillet, avant-garde Irish author James Joyce, and English stream of consciousness poet and essayist T.S. Eliot have also informed his practice. It would be fair to say that Linden’s oeuvre is a physical manifestation of an intellectual pursuit.
Working in a visual medium, the artist takes a literary approach to his work, while purposefully thwarting the narrative. Essentially dealing with abstraction, the paintings create an opportunity for implied narrative, but oftentimes the viewer is presented with just a study of shapes. Linden explains, “From their rhythm and displacement and succession you could almost say there is a narrative impulse, a storyteller impulse, but sometimes I do something deliberately wrong. I think that is an obligation of artists. Sometimes it’s important to get the wrong note right to make things work.”
The Look of Disquiet consists of a body of largely new work. A series of smaller pieces titled Reboot speak to a period of rehabilitation when Linden tested the waters after a battle with COVID. Also on display are assorted ephemera from the artist’s studio that illuminate the mechanics of his process, referencing a time when the drafting tools, triangles, straight edges and French curves, became the subject of his work.
An unapologetic truth seeker devoted to his craft, Linden’s career reflects a long history of painting, beginning as a student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and including a 20-year stint as a scenic artist in Hollywood, which taught him an economy of means. There remains an economy in Linden’s work as well as an economy of motion. He is incredibly adept at the act of painting. Today, the artist spends his time painting, reading and thinking, and painting some more. The cycle continues…
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Ron Linden (born 1940, Chicago, Illinois) is a California abstract painter, independent curator, and a retired Associate Professor of Art at Los Angeles Harbor College, Wilmington. He lives and works in the San Pedro area of Los Angeles and has exhibited in New York and California. In 1978 Linden received the individual artist’s grant in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art News, Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, LA Weekly, and Coagula Art Journal, among other media outlets.
