"Paintings on the Verge" - by Terry Swafford for the Kansas City art magazine "Review" which reviewed Jon Aley's show "Moving in you" at the Green Door Gallery--November 8-December 8, 2002
 
Returning to Kansas City from an extended, work-intensive stay in Arizona, Jon Aley recently presented Moving In You at Green Door Gallery, an extensive and varied exhibition representing a full immersion in the ideal of painting for the sake of painting. Displaying a consistent disregard for cliched pictorial devices, Aley seeks instead a highly individualized mode of speaking. His objectives seem to remain consistent: articulating mental spring boarding and the way in which memory, as well as fictive associations, enhance perception. Meaning is generated as the paintings are worked through - as intuitive, causal markmaking is proceeded by reactive marks, canvas rotations, narrative evolutions, and edits. The resulting images generally teem with agitated surface variety.
 
Narratives form the basis for most painting formations. Common elements utilized are fields of color, object and figure symbols, and evocations of built structures, nature, and the cosmos. Subplots are present as well in Aley's paintings, though often shrouded, suggesting tangential associations or minor chords.
 
Conveying the feeling of occupying two or more planes at once is a running theme throughout the work. In processing a new experience, related memories are retapped by present sensory stimulants as a means of evaluating what is taking place. In this way, one may occupy a present, physical space while mentally reliving an abstracted memory plane. In Forest at Night, Dreaming of Ocean, a prime example of this interface, the sensuousness of two environments is related by means of color. Passages within the painting range from identifiable material certitudes (tree trunks and foliage merge with a vertical rectangle of ocean) to a sort of murky fog, rich with colored points of light descriptive of temperatures and suggestive of sensations, such as how the air might feel or smell in the forest or ocean.
 
Horse Falling from Sky, Dandelion Exploding, Bridge of Splinter Houses is less random in its juxtapositions than the title suggests. Through skillful arrangement and design, singular elements and the movements between passages work together. Nebula-like sky formations cast above the most developed version of one running icon, the "splinter house" structure. A hollowed barn framework with matchstick walls forms the compositional geometry and homestead grounding for paintings that tend to wander the metaphysical and extraterrestrial.
 
Another important recurring theme in Aley's work is the disintegration of matter. This aspect embodies several of the artist's concerns, including a preoccupation with time progression, a sense of play with physical laws, and a breaking apart of predetermined sensibilities. Aley is deeply involved in constructing a material equivalent to his internal universe to the point where outside forces have very little influence. The overall look of these paintings is therefore distinctive and owes more to introspection and invention than to borrowing. Absent is an acknowledgment of the context of contemporary painting in which he is working.
 
Because the driving concepts behind Aley's imagery are highly evolved and complex, to discern them requires sustained observation and effort. In most cases, descriptive titles provide a sort of "Cliff's Notes" summary guide for the viewer. While this enables Aley to meet the majority of his audience halfway, one cannot help but to find the titles an impediment to personal interpretation. On the occasions when the titles succeed, it is because Aley has managed to distill the visual poetry of their paintings, as with Bluebird Tracing Night Water, Light Catching and Bypassing Figure, and Figure Discovering Itself as a Tornado.
 
The most dramatic piece in the exhibition, in terms of the manner in which Aley teeters dangerously on the edge of painting taboo then enacts a recovery, is Green Woman on Purple Blanket, Yellow Child on Belly, Multiple Figures in Background. By building the surface to resemble an enlarged detail of a Renoir bouquet, a problem is established. His solution is to exit in an unpredictable and incongruent manner, by means of paint-handling reminiscent of natural lava flow and Chaim Soutine. The cluster of forms produced through this action becomes the painting's focal point, while its juxtaposition to the rest of the surface is of sustainable interest. Aley revels in setting up such challenges, and pushes and pulls with an uncompromised reckless attitude. The dynamic of this progress, completely played out on the surface of a painting, is invigorating.