Form Comes
For Ron Adams form comes through the careful interplay of colour, geometry and text. His paintings are explorations of these elemental parts and their convergence shapes his idiosyncratic visual language. Adams has developed this language over many years and through conversations with him, it is evident that he thoughtfully selects his colours, shapes and words with specific subjective intentions, because like many of us, he makes art as a way of trying to process and understand the world around him. Like a filter, Adams distills the clutter, the noise of our contemporary world through a process of breaking down his chosen forms. He reconstructs common universal symbols with a positive chromatic intensity. He takes a word and gives it pictorial status. He lifts cartoon characters embedded within our collective pop culture memories and reminds us of their sweet simple symmetry.
The title of the exhibition, Under Heavy Manners, speaks volumes about both Adams and his work. For him, manners and etiquette are important; several of the works in the show speak of the currency of friendship and the ways in which we all relate. Any colour you are (five points), is a painting that explores what Josef Albers referred to as the relativity of colour and shows what happens between colours when they relate or interact. Adams describes the painting as an anti-xenophobic-world flag for all.* In this sense, his painterly explorations into colour relativity also point outward, toward the social, as the title suggests, to inter-personal relations. AGOG, the golden text that runs along the bottom of the painting suggests that Adams is hopeful and keen, in his own way, to keep the dream for world peace alive and as a friend of the artist, this warms my heart because Adams really is full of love.
Kylie Banyard
Photos: Docqment
