WTFDIAM (c. 2015), Random Thoughts (2017), Circle Jerks (2019) and Many Rivers to Cross (2019) are four of Ford Crull’s recent paintings although the exhibition showcases more than a decade of his works. They affirm, if any affirmation were needed, that Crull remains an unapologetic painter of extravagant, idiosyncratic vision who has no doubts about his métier. His focus on a single medium seems remarkable at the moment, since such singularity has become rare among younger artists for whom diversity in disciplines is the norm. But Crull, a New York-based artist with a studio in lower Manhattan, is a painter. He has always been a painter and having chosen it--or perhaps it chose him—continues to find in it an inexhaustible source of possibilities. 

These paintings have had many antecedents over the decades of his prolific production. 
Progression as a linear proposition is not a concept that engages him, fully aware that no moment is the same and no painting is the same, his model more that of circular time and recurrence, although perhaps more as symbolist metaphor than theoretical physics. He is an artist who seems to have complete faith in subjectivity. Guided by intuition (he sometimes makes “blind” paintings), he deep-dives into his unconscious—or a collective unconscious—of signs and symbols and seizes what he discovers there. The resultant paintings reflect a confluence of circumstances that depend upon a preternaturally mindful state of being as well as the ability to let go, abetted by skills mastered through years of painting and by the process of painting. 

His style incorporates both abstraction and figuration and a horror vacuii in signature all-over compositions that summon up images of genesis and apocalypse, pushing far beyond the picture plane. The works, no matter their actual or illusionistic dimensions, almost always appear vast, oceanic, pictures of micro- and macroworlds. Each brims with a characteristic lexicon of imagery and pulses with an exhilarating and distinctive rhythm, visually expanding and contracting, an exhalation and inhalation that suggests the body’s breath, or the ebb and flow of earthly or cosmic phenomena. The paint is brushed, smudged, smeared, and dripped, creating a sense of percussive eruptions and transitions. They might be described as energy fields, and are more visceral than cerebral, to be sensed and experienced. 

The earliest of the four is the boldly colored WTFDIAM, its forms strung across the painting like playful flags signaling a grand opening or decorative holiday embellishments. Primarily text, the words are only legible after a longer look. It asks one over-riding eschatological question alluded to in the title—but I’ll let you decipher that for yourself. Random Thoughts, made two years later, is also text-based, but cool in tone, the ground a lyrical mix of pastels inscribed with quick questions and non-committal answers in a spikey script, a kind of vernacular existentialism scrawled by street taggers who’ve read Albert Camus. 

In Circle Jerks, his symbols are either enclosed in translucent globes, float outside of them or are layered beneath, like pentimenti, the most frequent that of a Greek cross or variants thereof, three-leafed plants that might be beneficial or toxic, arrows, irregular geometric forms and what suggests ancient Egyptian hieratic script to me. Many of the symbols are seen across cultures and encourage wide-ranging associations and multiple readings. In other works, for instance, I see fleur-de-lis, fiddlehead ferns, and hearts. White etherealizes the painting as it radiates from the center and seeps throughout the ground, pumping it full of space, as if lifted by drafts of upward air, each globe a parallel world, part of the multiverse. 

Many Rivers to Cross, one of the highlights of the show, is more obviously full-spectrum and underscores Crull’s fearlessness as a colorist. Densely packed, symphonic, it is dominated by electric shades of reds, greens and blues, with spidery botanical drawings etched in white and text scribbled in black. White gives way here to a dazzling yellow, like a river of pure gold coursing through a teeming, kaleidoscopic panorama, a passage to paradise or perdition. 

Fantasias and reckonings, these are paintings to explore and revel in. 

Lilly Wei

Lilly Wei is a New York-based art critic, writer and independent curator.