TRAVIS ERION: SYMBOLS OF THE SOUL
Essay By: Gerrit Henry
Contributing Editor for ARTnews magazine and reviews for Art in America.
Symbolism – the imbuing of an object or being with meaning beyond a strictly realistic one -- flourished in Europe for many centuries after the Renaissance, especially in Dutch and Flemish painting, where almost every detail of a particular work, be it portrait, still life, or interior, bore a psychological or metaphysical freight above and beyond mere appearance, in later centuries, though, it fell into disfavor – the thing itself was, after all, the thing itself, as the beginnings of modern philosophy and science would have it, no more or less or anywhere in between.
The oil paintings of Travis Conrad Erion do not constitute a wholesale return to Western symbolism, but they are something of a one-person revival of the mode. Technically, Erion – who apprenticed under sculptor Fritz White and painter Richard Schmid -- is something of a whiz. His brand of super-realism is stunningly eristic; form and color are absolutely faithful to the realities they represent, tone and modeling are pure and perfect, and light plays across an Erion with all the exacting ardor the painter can summon for that quality.
If he left things there, we would have just another American super-realist, a bland worshipper of the everyday, a follower of tabloid truths. Fortunately, Travis Erion has much more on his mind than verisimilitude; Erion is interested in telling a story -- a maxim, an adage, even an allegory of inanimate objects -- concerning life in these post-20th century United States and just how vainglorious and vexatious it can be.
And, here again, things mean things other than themselves. The red-glass leavings of a smashed Christmas ornament remind us, comically and crucially, of the delicate hell of that holiday, with Christmas spirit swept away neatly -- but never completely -- into the garbage can. In the best symbolist tradition, Erion’s titles are often plays and puns on the situation they present: Forbidden Fruit entails three high-reflection apples chained and locked away on the white table top that is the setting for so many of these canvases, with the key to the lock balanced precariously on table’s edge. How much more literal- -and grimly comic -- a commentary can you get on desire, desire in this case foregone because, as so often, there is no access to its accoutrements?
Still, we may ask ourselves, what does it all mean? People, Erion comments, tend to take many of his works for their surface values – especially that high-gloss brushstroke – and ignore completely the subtexts that abound. This, though, is impossible after any close reading of the work. Where traditional European symbolism tended to give its subjects religious – usually Roman Catholic – underpinnings, Erion is an outright romancer of the secular symbolic – Hook, Line, and Sinker attached to a cell phone speak volumes about America’s current infatuation with those little lumps of flashing plastic, and a painting of three dog bones – Morning Noon & Night – comments bitingly about the thoroughly conditional – and conditioned – love of man’s best friend.
Perhaps, in the end, though, Erion is something of a religious painter; he certainly is a moral one, with his grab bag of old saws and proverbs and fables run surreally, but quite seriously, amok. It’s almost a kind of spiritual art of the sort we would seem to have long left behind. In this day of multiplying corporate scandal and the war mongering of self interest and abuse in high places, Travis Erion would seem to be a welcome presence – in the old, best, and most a ethereal sense of the word.
