It is an abstract picture of a german kornelkirsche tree standing at the shore of a small park pond, painted by a brain-damaged elderly patient. The picture looks like

Result #1

It is an abstract picture of a german kornelkirsche tree standing at the shore of a small park pond, painted by a brain-damaged elderly patient. The picture looks like a fragmented image of a T-shirt, complete with the text I NEED YOUR TEARS. The text is not much of a response. It is not even much of a response to the image.

Result #2

a bad folktronic comic book, with thousands of colorful ribbons arranged on a horizontal surface.The most recent painting, which appeared in the Whitney Biennial in 1987, is even more diffuse, composed of a couple of dozen horizontal stripes arranged in a large circle, with a short one in the middle. It is a good deal more painterly than the other two, and shows a greater sensitivity to the effects of a layering of paint. And it is more successful as a coloristic composition, with a more controlled texture and a more realistic feel. Theres a suggestion of a tree in the picture, which is a real tree, but not a real one that looks like it. In this case, the identification of the painting with the real thing is an easy enough task, and not just because theres nothing in the picture that could be construed as a tree. It has to do with the fact that the tree seems to be on a pedestal. And theres nothing in the picture that could be construed as a pedestal either. A standard painter might try to do something with these materials, but thats all there is to it. It may be that theres something in the picture that, as a metaphor for a kind of art, says Something I want to see, something I want to do, something I want to be. Theres no more to see, and theres nothing more to do. A lot of the pictures in the Whitney Biennial, then, seem like formal exercises in the blankness of meaning.

Result #3

It is an abstract picture of a german kornelkirsche tree standing at the shore of a small park pond, painted by a brain-damaged elderly patient. The picture looks like a Gris Gris drawing, with a cast of human hands grasping a tree branch, which is in turn cast in bronze, its stump also taken from a kornelkirsche tree.In the next room, a young man, in his teens, was seen from the waist up, casting his gaze upon a blue-painted wall. While the work was silent, the room, which resembled a third-floor lounge, was populated by a group of four young men, all in their teens. The group sat around a table, taking their seats around the window shade. The young man, dressed in a bright blue button-down and white Adidas sneakers, stared at the four seated boys. He seemed to be waiting for someone to sit with him. But there wasnt anyone else to talk to. In the middle of the table was a brown leather jacket with a red zipper pulled tight around one of the boys arms. The jacket was stuck on the table like a cheap perfume bottle, and one could smell the cigarette smoke from within the confines of the table. At the moment of discovery, the young mans eyes, with a smirk, slipped into a feral expression. The four men, at the same time, stared at the man. They looked at each other, silently. The young man, who had been sitting on the bench, looked directly at the four men, who were staring at him. They seemed to be contemplating a long-standing problem: how to talk to someone about something they have never even imagined doing? They had a mutual respect for each other that they could never have had on their own turf. The problem of communication was all-pervasive, and it defined the young mans adolescence. It was what defined his relationship with the other young men. He was an embodiment of their desire for something to happen to them. But this desire was always pent up and never satisfied.

Result #4

It is an abstract picture of a german kornelkirsche tree standing at the shore of a small park pond, painted by a brain-damaged elderly patient. The picture looks like an early-twentieth-century advertisement for the beaches of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Templeton. The tree, a greenery in the midst of a human-made marsh, is over twenty feet tall, and is connected to a rigid sign on the signboard: a low fence topped with barbed wire. The fence seems to frame the pool, as if to isolate it, but one can hardly discern the motive for the fence. The tree, though, is alive, and its roots are spreading. The fence is the fence.What is shocking about these paintings is not the crude and filthy surface, but rather the realization that these are paintings by a professional artist. The pictures are meticulously composed, and the paint is thick, applied in a controlled manner. Paintings are often considered to be an exercise in spontaneity, but here, the spontaneity is diminished. The control is there, but the painting technique is sterile. The pictures are like paintings of nature, or nature paintings. This is not the case with Joness pictures, however; they are totally controlled. It is as if the pictures were pictures of objects, or pictures of the world.Theres nothing that looks more like a natural picture than a painting. That is not a quality, it is a quality only natural. Joness pictures are like those of old masters—they are beautiful, they are sophisticated, and they are perfect. They are perfect, precisely perfect, and are quite beautiful.Joness pictures are not just pictures, they are paintings. He has been praised for his artistic mastery over his works. He does not display a mastery of the vocabulary of painting, however, but rather he has mastered it. The paintings are beautiful, and the art is beautiful. Joness paintings are beautiful, and are not any less sophisticated than art.Joness paintings are more sophisticated than many modern painters.

Result #5

a Google image search for the word tree—a kind of montage of the accidental, the improvised, the quotable.The curators also included one of Toronis best-known works, Self-Portrait as a Hippie, 1986, which features him as a hippie, his face carefully drawn into a headscarf. The image is the art installation that gives Toroni his most famous namesake, and also his most personal. Here, the figure sits with the world (as if in an enormous, vacant film-noir set), dressed in a robe and a crucifix, a garment covering the head and the body of the deceased. The work is a somber meditation on mortality and decay. The body is replaced by an absence, a grave. This is where Toronis art finds its closest link to that of Maria Lindauer, who made a similar self-portrait in 1960, as was shown in the exhibition. Lindauer, too, chose to be seen as a corpse. Toroni is not concerned with the dead, but with the emptiness at the center of a sense of mortality.