Rarely actual portraits from life, Grenon's men and women all have distinctive characteristics. His characters may echo or recall individuals he has known, but most are constructed of features, expressions, and physical attributes that Grenon remembers, makes up, or composites various acquaintances.
The polished sheen of the clear glass, mounted in elaborately painted, recycled frames, acts as a distancing strategy. Framed at times like a family snapshot one might see on a missing child poster, or, at other times, as an irreverent celebration of unknown persons, Grenon's last quarter century of paintings on glass constitutes a body of work that is better known in the contemporary art world than in the sometimes overlapping and parallel glass art scene.
Critical commentary has ranged from lavish praised to vicious attacks, always a good sign of an artist's ability to provoke and engage. Although the pictures often exude a garish immediacy of a sensational cable news program, a closer look at Grenon's art suggests more subtle layers of meaning. His voluminous published statements in interviews and catalogue essays have created an intentional clutter that must be sorted for a more objective assessment. If some critics like Mary Jane Jacob (in a 1990 catalogue essay) pushed him closer to "outsider traditions of unschooled artists," others like Jae Carlsson in Artforum called his art "very human pornography." On the West Coast, politically correct critics have long been nervous about Grenon's depictions of battered women, calling then "revenge fantasies against women," "pop nihilism," and "unremitting hostility." These were usually followed by fawning interviews with the Wayne State University graduate wherein he disclaims all such charges.
The focus on biography and intention has served to keep Grenon's work from being examined for its full range of imagery and potential narratives. The key lies in an analogy to American Naturalist for Realist authors, often called the Chicago Group, in spite of its followers on the West Coast. From San Francisco novelist Frank Norris (1870-1902), author of McTeague (1899); writer Theodore Drieser (1871-1945), author of Sister Carrie (1900); and James T. Farrell (1904-1979), author of Studs Lonigan (1935); to Nelson Agren (1901-1981), author of Man with the Golden Arm (1949); and even Los Angeles writer Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), author of Post Office (1971), Grenon's own characters-black, white, male, female-take on a comparably iconic stature that begs to be unraveled and embellished by viewers.
The antique frames that Grenon heavily decorates under-cut the otherwise contemporary-looking figures and link them to a historical realm of the Chicago Group. With its own dialectics of beautiful/ugly, hopeful/defeatist, and learned/loser, the long chain of paintings has still more characteristics of early-to mid-20th century American fiction.
For Example, Appearance (2004-05) acts as a short story collection, a screen with a dozen separate female faces. Others like Magic House (2003), Rodeo Girl (1999), and Dancing with Mr. Jimi (1998) remove the characters from their lonely rooms, advancing them into ambiguous public scenes of leisure unexpected occupations and multiple plot expectations.
It's been tempting for art critics to surround the paintings with allusions to German Expressionism (Gabriele Munter once tried her hand at Hinterglasmalerei) and Neo-Expressionism (he's been compared to Francesco Clemente) but the grittier realism of Grenon sets him in the less emotional, more clear-eyed territory of tabloid newspapers. Encyclopedic in that so many types of people are represented, Grenon's impressive oeuvre restores a literary dimension to American painting that puts the onus of storytelling on the viewer.
Reflecting the interest in the personal, as well as the absorbed individualism of much West Coast art and art criticism, critical response generally has fallen into the trap of detailing the artist's various trials and tribulations without due efforts at interpreting the art. Treating him like a cold-eyed naturalist or realist, the viewer can appreciate the artist's vast powers of storytelling, his myriad narrative implications conveyed through the smudged and slashing paint on glass. Even better, the paintings contain enough individual details to ring true as portraits of real people, as true as Sister Carrie, Dreiser's hapless heroine.
Titles like No! Everything is Not Cool (2004), Reflect Me (2005), and Then You Turn Around (2005) are conversational commands, triggers to narrative implications. Often caught mid-gesture (hand to face, supporting a chin, thrust between legs), the paintings allude to filmmaking as well as tabloid newspapers and even to women's fashion magazines like Vogue that Grenon has always pored over.
Grenon's background as a printmaker and studio technician at the legendary Detroit and Chicago Landfall Press has helped him immensely in arranging his compositions backwards on the glass as on a printing plate or a lithographer's stone. Broad areas of flat color also resemble prints. However Grenon has balanced the sealed-in quality of the reverse-glass painting process with the wildly decorated frames. Texture envelopes the figure like luxury clothing separated from deprived or undeserving figures.
One work closer to home compels a final comment. Uncertainty (2001) uses spots of paint and shards of glass over a woman's face to depict the wretched aftermath of the morning of September 11, 2001. Staring in stark terror., immersed in a chromatic shower of toxic detritus, Uncertainty's heroine could tell 8 million stories. It is one of the more successful and moving responses to the World Trade Center tragedy.
The brittleness of glass, its transparency and basis for brisk painthandling, may recall other glass artists using the human figure in painterly ways. Paul Marioni, Cappy THompson, Dick Weiss, and Walter Leiberman come to mind. But those artists embed the color in the glass; Grenon is applying it via paitn onto glass. Less strictly hot-shop-based than the others, he has been freed to expose brushworkm the blending of oil paints, and the immediacy of effect that his chosen process provides. Process becomes a gateway, not a destination point, leading to some of the strongest and most disturbing narrative-figurative art being created today.
With glass as a plinth or a vewhicle, Grenon's people emerge for our inspection, contemplation, and a judgment that is withheld from them in place of pity and compassion.
-MATTHEW KANGAS