Select Press

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Paintings from Joan Moment offer a tantalizing look at an important artist ripe for a career retrospective…Condom Relief Series No. 1, 1971 (refabricated in 1993) brilliantly responds to and riffs on art world practices of the 1970s, placing 96 condoms in a large grid on gauze, so that figure and ground share the same pale, slightly translucent golden color.  It immediately calls up many associations of its time, from Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt to Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman.  This utilization of the formal language of Minimalism and the modernist grid — in condoms — is an ideal marriage of form and content. It celebrates and mocks the formalist obsession with the grid, purity and formal elegance with earthy humor and maybe a little shot (if I may) at the masculine pretensions of much minimalist art and art criticism. It’s brilliant, fun, funny, and, just as importantly, gorgeous.  

—Bridget Quinn, “She Laughs Back @ Sac State,” Squarecylinder, March 3, 2024

Joan Moment’s Haloed Condom Relief Piece No. 7 (1971), the conceptual lynchpin of the show, reaches beyond Funk’s rudely jocular visual punditry to address the more significant concerns of feminism and sexuality.  Inspired by Eva Hesse’s rubber latex hangings and Yayoi Kusama’s early phallus-encrusted sculptures, the work best conveys the curators’ premise.  Fabricated from layers of rubber latex, neoprene rubber, gauze, condoms and acrylic, the painting recalls the dotted sequences seen in Australian Aborigine bark paintings and African clay vessels. The wiggling grid of condoms, both comic and figurative — topped by haloes delineated in acid yellow and covered with meticulously painted dots — writhes like primordial amoeba on a black ground, riveting the eye with its relentless motion. 

—Julia Couzens, “Beyond Funk,” Squarecylinder, September 9, 2021

“Her paintings are highly personalized maps of the universe. Forms emerge out of thin, flowing washes — of bright yellow or deep blue — that are applied while the canvas is horizontal and bring to mind riparian flood plains, tidal eddies, lava flows, deserts and other terrestrial forms as seen from a great height…It is through these subtle disorientations that the viewer comes to distrust the ingrained concept of a fixed self…Rather, Moment suggests the notion that we live outside of time and space; that we are at once everywhere and nowhere – like stars and galaxies whose images are history before they even reach us.  Her work attempts to register this fleeting, almost incomprehensible reality.”   

—David Olivant, Squarecylinder, Sept. 7, 2009

“Moment’s paintings correspond not to realities, but to mental postures in which we face ultimate things. We may have only the crudest models of ultimate realities, her art suggests, yet find ourselves equipped with needful intuitions of feeling that hard science precludes.” 

—Kenneth Baker, “Abstraction has its Moment,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 15, 2009

Moment "advances explorations into the use of abstract biomorphic shapes as primordial archetypes that embody both emotional and spiritual states."

—Victoria Dalkey, “Circular Logic,” Sacramento Bee, 1989

“Joan Moment’s new paintings at Rena Bransten offer what might be called a mytho-erotic image in their presentation of connotative elements that are at once primordial and cosmological in nature…They are in keeping with a host of cross-cultural art-history tradition which are like those represented by paleolithic ritual objects, tantric manuscripts and the stone-cut depictions of erotic entangled figures that adorn the walls of some ancient Hindu temples in India…Needless to say the use of such imagery…is nothing new.  Yet Moment’s paintings demonstrate an ability to make this concern convincing, and she does so in terms that are respectful of the ideas and affects generated…” 

—Mark Van Proyen, “Seeking a Primordial Form,” Artweek, Dec. 21, 1985

Moment “is working hard to make painting short-circuit language intelligently, and I believe that to be the kind of effort that keeps the art of painting vital and unpredictable.” 

—Kenneth Baker, “Trying to Painting Beyond Words,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 6, 1985

“The surface texture is both primitive – that is, unrefined – and also contemporary code for painterly risks and liberties…Thus, the composition becomes an overall pattern that reflects the artist's mind, not just the intrinsic organizational properties of primitive line and holistic form.  Through this subtle but major step, Moment's work achieves a rich, intuitively stacked equivalence between surface and image that reminds me of Philip Guston's work and its thick, cartoon-like sexuality.  And like a cartoon jumping the storyboard, Moment's art comes to life as a primitive rhythm instead of just looking like one."  

—Jeff Kelley, “Structures and Patterns,” Artweek, May 7, 1983

“While Moment is successful in experiments with formal conventions from the past, the real strength of her work lies in its largely unconscious reflection of contemporary values…In our consumer society, directness very often equates with superficiality, a transposition traceable in large part to advertising and package art.  In the present, this this turnabout is plain to see, both in the look of Moment’s work and in the ideas that underlie its creation.” 

—Roger Green, “Impressive Moments at Galerie Simonne Stern,” States-Item: Lagniappe (New Orleans), February, 1979

“Joan Moment is a highly sophisticated primitive.  She paints imaginary jungles, forests, waterfalls, churches and whatnot in an infinity of small strokes of chalky acrylic so the result looks like stitchery or a fine mosaic.  Everything is drawn flat and with equal emphasis…and the result is decorative, entertaining, and in the large works, grandly impressive…”

—Alfred Frankenstein, “Elegant Primitive Paintings,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 1976