TRAVIS CONRAD ERION
Essay By: John Mendelsohn
Reviews for Cover Magazine and reviews for Art Net International magazine.
Painting with an admirable fluency, Travis Conrad Erion renders the soft sheen of an apple’s skin and the raw iron of an anchor with equal ease. But perhaps his greatest talent lies in his ability to represent reality in both its visible and invisible aspects. The visible is all that the artist closely observes and paints with a paradoxically meticulous dispatch. The invisible encompasses that which resides just beneath the surface -- humor, irony, and the surreal.
Erion’s art exists at the confluence of seeing and believing, where these two streams of consciousness meld and roll. The viewer is asked to negotiate their shirting dominance by entering into a painted world where resolutely real objects silently speak, acting out small dramas on a tabletop stage. In the painting, Sweating It Out three slightly deflated balloons, red, white and blue, (surrogates for us all), seem to perspire while trying to keep up a brave front, despite the nearby threat of a safety pin. In Hook, Line, and Sinker, proverbial gullibility is made real with fishing line entangling a cellular phone.
In these and other examples, puns both describe and undercut the literal, alluding to an unacknowledged truth. Instead of indulging the viewer’s passive receptivity, Erion induces our laughter and our consternation, engaging us in an active process of teasing out meaning as we look into his paintings.
This involvement becomes provocative when the artist’s images become charged with a distinct psychological tension. In Forbidden Fruit, three apples are chained together like damsels in distress, both abject and covertly seductive. The three pears in Repaired (yes, we must pardon the pun) are similarly at the mercy of an unseen force. Two of the pears, a la St. Sebastian, are pierced by long screws, while a third is righted by a wooden shim.
In Travis Conrad Erion’s small, often cryptic allegories, common objects are given their plainspoken due. In restrained, even stark altar-like settings, these objects eloquently tell of desire and fear, the quotidian and the perverse, unafraid to mystify or challenge us, or even to make us smile while we think.
