Painting as a Technology of Attention: Aerial Logic in the Work of Joanne Greenbaum
Joanne Greenbaum
Untitled, 2025
Oil, ink, acrylic, and flashe on canvas
90 × 70 in.
Courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery, New York.
This essay is part of an ongoing series on painting, attention, and non-teleological composition. It examines Joanne Greenbaum’s use of the scaffold not as motif, but as a perceptual system—one that organizes looking through duration, repetition, and anti-hierarchical color.
Years ago, Greenbaum articulated a deceptively simple directive: a painter must decide whether a work will operate atmospherically or structurally. That decision, she suggested, determines the internal continuity of the painting. Her own practice, she explained, is born of structures—specifically, the scaffold. In urban environments, scaffolding is unavoidable. It appears from a distance as provisional geometry and at street level as something one must pass beneath, descend into, or maneuver around. Precarious yet protective, functional yet disorienting, it is both an infrastructural necessity and a visual maze. Greenbaum’s sustained attention to this form allows painting to function as a site where color, line, and spatial memory circulate without resolving into representation.
As a visual system, Greenbaum’s work centers on a single structural logic that enables an expansive range of perceptual experiences. The scaffold functions not as motif but as method—a compositional intelligence — or even a directional, almost biological, growth — that organizes looking without directing it. Through this logic, Greenbaum constructs paintings that do not present images to be consumed, but environments to be navigated. The viewer floats above a dense corner of vignetted architecture — an island-as-city, and a centralized, iterative composition — filtered through the contrasting material truth of color the temporal conditions of the Manhattan painter’s studio.
Greenbaum’s paintings do not resolve toward an image so much as they establish conditions for sustained looking. What initially appears as an informal dispersal of marks—scaffolds, stripes, looping lines, architectural fragments, chromatic intervals that refuse to settle into background—gradually reveals a rigorously non-teleological compositional logic. There is no privileged destination for the eye and no hierarchy of figure and ground to stabilize perception in advance. Instead, the paintings function as technologies of attention: structures that hold the viewer in a prolonged state of perceptual negotiation, where looking unfolds in a durational manner rather than instrumentally.
This logic situates Greenbaum within a lineage of modern and postwar practices concerned less with abstraction as style than with abstraction as a problem of perception. A limited comparison to René Magritte is instructive—not as a conceptual parallel, but as a historical precedent for images that function as perceptual apparatuses. Magritte’s quieter works deploy windows, curtains, and partial occlusions to disrupt visual orientation without resolving into allegory. These devices do not explain the image; they position the viewer within it. Greenbaum’s scaffolds work in a materially distinct register: not metaphorical substitutions, but structural mechanisms that organize looking itself. Where Magritte produces perceptual tension through contradictions of logic through imagery, Greenbaum sustains perceptual circulation through accumulation, repetition, and delay.
Color in Greenbaum’s work is distributed rather than subordinated. It neither recedes atmospherically, nor stabilizes structure in the manner of classical abstraction. Instead, color runs laterally, flattening the perceptual field without neutralizing it. No element claims dominance; the eye moves because it cannot settle. This even-weighted chromatic field produces an anti-hierarchical mode of seeing in which attention is continuously recalibrated. The refusal of a perceptual hierarchy allows the viewer to postpone resolution and be held to enter, instead in a state of ongoing adjustment.
Temporality is central to this operation. Greenbaum’s compositions enact pause rather than progression. Marks repeat without reiteration; gestures recur without consolidating into motif. The paintings accumulate rather than unfold. James Elkins has described images that “look back” at the viewer, exerting pressure not through iconography but through duration itself.[1] Greenbaum’s paintings inhabit this register. They do not present content so much as generate the conditions under which looking must persist.
The scaffold, recurring throughout Greenbaum’s work, is best understood diagrammatically. It frames without enclosing, supports without stabilizing, and directs movement without dictating outcome. Designed for transit rather than habitation, it guides the eye inward and outward simultaneously—into the painting and back toward a remembered urban exterior. In Untitled (2025), the viewer’s eye descends a winding scaffold that suggests both architectural passage and perceptual drift. With sustained attention, the structure situates the viewer within a spatial memory: a stairwell, a street edge, or a partially obscured view glimpsed through construction fencing.
Greenbaum’s layered colored-pencil lines further complicate this logic. Neither atmospheric nor structural, these looping swirls generate motion without trajectory. Their sensuality lies in persistence rather than expression: the repeated act of tracing, layering, and returning. Multiplicity here is not abundance but duration—the experience of being still with difference over time. Paul Klee’s description of drawing as “taking a line for a walk” offers a useful framework for understanding this operation, emphasizing movement over endpoint and process over resolution.[2]
The perceptual consequences of this field are significant. Even-weighted color cuts the cues that typically organize attention—foreground and background, emphasis, and support. Perception becomes active rather than receptive; the image must be navigated rather than consumed – one feels like they might be called to descend into the urban abyss – that bodes us with blooming color. The painting remains open not because it is vague, but because it stays open to disclosure. Michael Fried’s critique of theatricality in Minimalist works framed duration as a threat to aesthetic autonomy.[3] Greenbaum’s work suggests the opposite: that duration is one of painting’s most generative capacities.
What distinguishes Greenbaum’s practice is a commitment to sustaining attention in a visual culture oriented toward immediacy and resolution. Her paintings do not ask to be understood; they ask to be inhabited. In doing so, they reaffirm painting’s capacity to function not as representation or expression, but as a technology of attention—one that sustains through delay, multiplicity, and the persistent refusal of hierarchy.
Endnotes
James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (New York: Praeger, 1969).
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (1967).
Bibliography
Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5, no. 10 (1967).
Klee, Paul. Pedagogical Sketchbook. New York: Praeger, 1969.