In Chicago:2024, McArthur Binion continues his decades-long excavation of the self—layered not as confession but as architecture. Composed of gridded marks meticulously overlaid atop personal documents, this 2024 work is less a painting than it is a palimpsest: part autobiography, part abstraction, and wholly resistant to passive consumption. What may initially appear as an exercise in formalist geometry quickly dissolves under close inspection, revealing a lived archive embedded beneath repetitive labor and pigment. With Binion, meaning is constructed through ritual. His brush doesn’t so much decorate as it rehearses—an act of meditative return.

The Grid as Memory Machine

At first glance, Chicago:2024 presents a bifurcated field: the left side in a luminous wash of red-orange, the right a muted purple-crimson haze. Each side is composed of a dense matrix of hand-drawn squares—rigid, unforgiving, precise in their imperfection. These aren’t mechanical reproductions; they are handmade—flawed, fluctuating, human.

Yet behind this geometric repetition lies something more intimate: Binion’s signature method of embedding photocopied personal documents—birth certificates, address books, ID photos—beneath the painted surface. These documents form the first layer, the substrate of identity that is obscured and revealed in equal measure. The grid becomes a veil and a window, simultaneously concealing and exposing the body behind the work.

In Chicago:2024, the left half of the composition radiates warmth, suggesting presence, life, or origin—perhaps a reference to the artist’s roots in Mississippi or his years in New York. The right half, darker and more subdued, evokes absence, erasure, or a shift in tone. This chromatic dichotomy becomes a visual metaphor for time: memory illuminated and memory receding.

Autobiography Through Abstraction

McArthur Binion, born in 1946 in Macon, Mississippi, has long resisted classification. While his work operates in dialogue with minimalist and conceptual traditions—echoing the grids of Agnes Martin, the structural repetition of Sol LeWitt, or the materiality of Jack Whitten—it does so with a radical autobiographical insistence. For Binion, the self is not rendered as image but encoded into the surface.

“I make my own geography,” he once stated. This geography is not topographic but psychological—a cartography of migration, memory, and making. In works like Chicago:2024, he transforms the deeply personal into a visual form that resists immediate comprehension. One must look closely, repeatedly, even obsessively to detect the buried documents beneath the squares. The grid, then, is both surface and barrier—an invitation and a refusal.

Binion’s paintings are never mute. They whisper, insistently, through repetition. They are dense with personal history, yet they never resort to spectacle or confession. They are private utterances made public, but only to those willing to do the labor of seeing.

The Labor of the Hand

What distinguishes Binion from his minimalist forebears is the insistence on the hand. Every line in Chicago:2024 is drawn individually—an act of endurance and ritual. There is no mechanical precision, no cold automation. His work is deeply physical, deeply human. In this way, Binion inverts the logic of the grid as a tool of control and order. He disrupts its neutrality by suffusing it with emotion and body.

Each mark is a timestamp. Each square, a measure of time passed, effort expended. This is labor as visual language. The grid becomes a clock, a score, a song. And like jazz—an ever-present influence in Binion’s practice—his paintings embrace repetition as improvisation, variation, and breath.

In Chicago:2024, we witness a kind of painterly looping, a performative mark-making that functions like a call to memory. The artist becomes a scribe, a monk, a worker. His tools are humble. The result is sacred.

Chicago as Context and Code

The title Chicago:2024 positions this work not just temporally but geographically. Binion has lived and worked in Chicago since the 1990s, and the city permeates his practice—not through skyline silhouettes or neighborhood iconography, but through ethos. Chicago, a city shaped by Black migration, labor, jazz, and struggle, becomes a conceptual framework for Binion’s inquiries into identity and survival.

This 2024 piece can also be read as a response to our contemporary moment. In a time when digital abstraction dominates, Binion returns to the analog. In an era of image-saturation and algorithmic compression, he insists on opacity, slowness, and refusal. Chicago:2024 feels defiantly analog. There is no screen here, no pixel, no compression—just the body making marks against time.

Minimalism, Blackness, and the Question of Inclusion

Historically, the minimalist canon excluded Black artists—its language of impersonal geometry and industrial process assumed a universality that erased race. Binion, along with peers like Howardena Pindell, Melvin Edwards, and Jack Whitten, rewrote that exclusion by insisting on the self within structure.

But Binion’s work does not merely insert Blackness into minimalism. It transforms the very logic of the genre. By embedding autobiographical content into abstract form, he makes a radical gesture: insisting that the personal is political even in the most formal visual language.

Chicago:2024 is not just a painting. It is a cultural ledger. It records presence in a history that has often rendered Black lives invisible. Every gridline becomes a heartbeat. Every embedded document, a reclamation.

Aesthetic Restraint as Emotional Depth

The emotional intensity of Binion’s work is not achieved through spectacle or narrative—it emerges from formal constraint. In Chicago:2024, the limitations of color and structure become generative. The choice to divide the canvas chromatically evokes polarity—past/future, presence/absence, clarity/obfuscation. Yet the work refuses resolution.

The viewer is left in tension. The painting withholds its secrets. And that’s the point. Binion asks us to stay with the difficulty, to practice slow looking. In this way, he reclaims abstraction as a space of depth, of reflection, of meaning. He gives us no shortcut, no didacticism—only process.

On Legacy and Continuation

At 77, McArthur Binion is experiencing a late-career flourish. Once marginal to the market and mainstream institutions, his work is now collected, studied, and exhibited globally. But what remains constant is his refusal to dilute his process. In Chicago:2024, we see no trace of complacency. If anything, his marks are more rigorous, his documents more deeply buried, his palette more sophisticated.

This work doesn’t just speak to the past—it pushes toward the future. It asks: how do we continue to make work that holds personal truth and historical weight, even in a world saturated with spectacle?

Binion’s answer is clear: by working. By returning. By marking time.

Conclusion: The Grid, Reimagined

Chicago:2024 is not just a painting—it is a model for seeing. For remembering. For enduring. McArthur Binion has taken the cold austerity of the grid and made it warm, rhythmic, human. He has turned repetition into revelation. Through the insistence of the hand, the embedding of personal ephemera, and the refusal to make his work easy, he creates a language that is uniquely his own.

In a time of noise, Binion gives us silence. In a time of distraction, he offers rigor. In a time of forgetting, he insists on memory—not as image, but as mark.

This is not a retrospective gesture. Chicago:2024 looks forward. It continues. It invites us not to view the work, but to witness it. To see the labor. To feel the time. To enter the grid, and stay.

 

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