James Ochman

Untitled, Olive green (black, large)

1980s

Oil on canvas

27.75 x 20.75 inches

Excellent original condition

Provenance: Estate of the artist

Domestic shipping $75

James Ochman (1953-2019) was a San Francisco artist whose devout Catholicism shadowed his subtle, meditative, void-like abstractions.

Ochman came to San Francisco in the late 1970s after earning his MFA from Michigan State University. In 1982 he appeared in the Cal State Northridge exhibition New Bay Area Painting and Sculpture, curated by Christopher Brown and Judith Dunham. That was the peak of his exhibition career. He tested positive for HIV sometime after that, his studio practice slowed to a crawl, and he largely disappeared from view. But while he was painting hard he produced a concentrated little body of work that demonstrates what a fine spirit guide he makes for the issues around late-stage abstraction.

Ochman's empty-seeming paintings are actually finely-detailed tablets of color which reward slow, persistent observation with eye, nose, and even fingers. The surfaces vary: some of the smaller white paintings from the late 1970s are mushy and alive like fields of white fertilized soil. They seem fragile and especially vulnerable to chemical change. These paintings exist very much in the physical world, and like the anti-illusionistic paintings of Robert Ryman, the subject is mainly their materiality. Same thing with Ochman’s monochromes. Their opacity and titles draw attention to their objecthood and away from any metaphors they might propose for things like intellectual or spiritual illumination.

And yet, some of Ochman's paintings insist on being metaphors. These paintings point, as abstract paintings from Kasimir Malevich to Agnes Martin have done, to a transcendental space beyond painting, beyond the body, beyond the physical world, something analogous to the deep unconscious, the platonic world or the afterlife. Some of these paintings can be downright churchy, and function like little cathedrals.

Typical of Catholicism, Ochman presents the viewer with a classic duality: the material world versus the ideal world. And despite the proposition being steeped in the language of abstract painting, it's very personal. A few of his paintings have titles that suggest the artist measured his life through the trajectory of his art: he titled one painting Path; another Story; and a painting in beeswax, a medium he used a lot,The Reward. Whether or not Ochman felt his paintings succeeded on these personal terms we will never know. But one thing comes through clearly. Craft was crucial to the mission. Ochman's work is so precise it feels machined. Which sounds dehumanizing but it's just the opposite. For it appears with Ochman that all signs of human wavering had to be eliminated through heroic acts of patience, concentration and precision in order to create that all-important portal from the material world to the transcendental.