TRAVIS CONRAD ERION
Essay By: William Zimmer
New York City – February 2003
First of all, Travis Erion is a drop-dead realist painter. This is the foundation of his art. If the multitude of objects that he paints didn’t look like they do in real life, Erion’s art would have no punch.
But that’s just the foundation; Erion paints objects in the service of a seductive and often challenging content. Objects make up narratives. Some of them are puns that mix the verbal and the visual. For instance, Fish Sticks, is disquietingly literal: three silver trout are each impaled through the mouth on a stick.
It has become a convention with realist painters whose intention goes on farther than their virtuosity to present three exquisite objects as if they’re on a stage for the viewer’s contemplation. Erion sends up this rather solemn and vapid proclivity in a painting like Repaired. It’s a pun carried out by a trio of pears. Two have nails in them while the third has a piece of wood under it for balance.
We go through life employing clichés that, if taken literally, would disconcert us if they manifested themselves. Erion gives us Hook, Line and Sinker. In that painting the objects look foreign (especially on a clean tablecloth) as if dredged from deep water. About everything in contemporary life is ephemeral, so we feed on solid ground when we evoke the phrase Nuts and Bolts. In the eponymous painting the hardware is arrayed like monuments from a bygone time.
Erion has engineered a deft triumph with Forbidden Fruit. The red apples encircled with chains represent New York City and the overly solemn attitude taken toward it after 9/11. At the edge of the table is a key; New York can recover its larger-than-life identity.
The supports for the objects in most of the paintings are commonplace, boards of Masonite or plywood. This is an important signal. A sophisticated extremely skillful painter is addressing everyman, is addressing us.
