BOROFSKY,
JONATHAN (1942 - ) 
Nowhere is the confluence and incongruity of style and attitude more apparent than in the art of Jonathan Borofsky. Although his work over the past 30 years has been marked by numerous stylistic shifts, it remains primarily conceptual: it is as much about the process of creation as it is about the individual objects he makes.
In
the late 60s, after completing his academic art training, Borofsky
decided that "painting and object-making were dead"
and he stopped making "things" altogether. " I
started thinking a lot," he says, "Duchamp to Pollock,
Pollock to whom, to what?" For the better part of the year,
he sat in the studio, "writing thoughts down for hours at
a time-notations and diagrams about the universe and about time."
After a year or so of that "heavy thinking routine,"
Borofsky found himself writing numbers 1, 2, 3 ... 1, 2, 3 ...
1, 2, 3 ... repetitively on sheets of paper for an hour or more.
Eventually, he decided to count consecutively "from one
to whatever" and write the numbers on sheets of 8 1/2 x
11 inch paper, thinking that if he kept at it for a while, the
process might teach him something. Still counting in 1973 by
now the stack of papers measured 31/2 feet high and contained
more than 1,000,000 numbers-Borofsky found he had been making
little scribbles on the numbered pages-stick figures, heads in
trees and other cryptic forms-which initially he ignored. "Then
one day," as he explains it, "I looked at one of the
scribbles and thought, I'd like to make a painting of that. So
I went out and got a little canvas board and some oil paints-like
I was eight years old again and beginning my first painting lesson.
lt took me about two hours to finish it ... I took the number
I had been counting and put it in the corner of the painting.
Something connected there. I had both a recognizable image and
a conceptual ordering in time. I realized I could continue the
counting and yet bring back my image-making which I had dropped
in the late '60s." Thus began a long series of paintings,
each rendered on commercial canvas board in a naive, even childlike
style.
Indeed,
the first works in the series were based on childhood memories
but later, fueled by his group analysis sessions, Borofsky began
using his dreams as points of departure, writing them down on
paper in the morning, later transferring them to canvas boards
or stretched canvas. Borofsky's paintings provide a constant
reminder that beneath the exuberant expressionistic facade of
his art is a highly methodical base.
Perusing
the myriad images that span the past ten years of Borofsky's
production we find certain recurring themes, the most persistent
of which is "the fear of being chased." Commenting
on Borofsky's use of free association and dreams as catalysts
for his work, several critics have suggested a kinship between
his art and that of the surrealists. Unlike the surrealists,
however, who used dreams to probe the mysteries of the unconscious,
Borofsky uses dreams to clarify the meaning of ordinary experiences.
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