THE NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 10, 2002
JOSEPH RAFFAEL, Nancy Hoffman Gallery,
429 West Broadway
(212) - 966-6676 (through May 29)
A Pre-Raphaelite for
the 21st century, Mr. Raffael continues to
produce gorgeous, technically ambitious, un-
abashedly romantic watercolors. Painted in a
mix of squiggly line and patches of jewel-like
color, images of overgrown gardens or gold-
fish in a shimmering pool have the incandes-
cent luminosity of Tiffany stained glass win dows
(Johnson)
A MONOGRAPH WORTHY OF IT'S SUBJECT - APRIL 25, 2002
Grady Harp, California (Amazon Top 500 Reviewer)
REFLECTIONS OF NATURE: Paintings of Joseph Raffael is one of the most
elegant monographs on a practicing artist I have had the pleasure of
reading. Yes, "reading" is an operative word here. Too often artist
monographs are coffee table picture books, lush and lovely to look at,
enlightening as to a chronologial path of achievement, and even
historically relevant - solely on the basis of the images: the written
essays are seldom read and if they are read, they are merely perused.
Such is not the case with this warmly informative and evocative
collection of the works of this fine realist painter. Authors Amei
Wallach and Donald Kuspit write with courage about techniques (use of
the photograph as the springboard, method of appropriation form the
photo image to the paper or canvas, etc) that would frighten most of
our painters today, so revealing of secrets and methods publically
scorned as "copying" or NOT "representational". But the real coups in
this valuable volume is having the artist talk us through not only his
techniques, but is personal history and vulnerabilites.
As for the paintings, there are splendid reproductions of those
paintings we all know and love (koi, water, water lilies, flowers) but
there are also many examples of Raffael's wildlife images, spiritual
images, and those of his wife Lannis seeming to metamorphose out of her
garden. This book is a fine standard for future art books that stirve
to inform as well as document an artist's work. Even if you don't know
Raffael's paintings, I would recommend your adding this volume ot your
library - for you eye's AND your soul's sake. Outstanding!
The Transformation of Vision - The Mysterious Brilliance of Joseph Raffael
NYArts Magazine - July 2002
Mark Daniel Cohen
If
visual art left us seeing as we see without it, there would be no need
for art. If there were no altering influence to the artistic
experience, if nothing came of our encounter but the information of the
artists' reports, if art merely informed us rather than transformed us,
then we would value nothing but the news we found, nothing other than
the journalism and the opinions the works conveyed. We would lose the
common sense of art's intrinsic importance, of art's special care for
attention. When our eyes are not touched by the vision, our souls have
not been reached, and when we find that art has left us seeing no
differently, there has effectively been no art, for the artistic effect
has been absent. As it has been absent too often and for too long. For
decades, we have devoted ourselves to inventiveness and to an earnest
and futile theorizing, and we have rendered a spectrum of new forms of
art, new methods of expression that deposit nothing but journalism and
opinion, nothing but the statement and the point of view. Something has
been missing, and what we have missed is what we once and far better
knew: the arsenal and battery of art's conjuring power, the alembic in
which its potion is distilled : the spell of the enchantment, the
palpable trance of a rigorous beauty. And as for what we knew once, in
art as in all things, it is our doom that we forget. For the nature of
the cast trance of beauty is not a knowledge we can simply know and
thereby remember :Êit is a knowledge one must feel, it is a truth
understood only in the encounter, only in the now. And so, it is as it
should be : we need artists continually to tell us the nature of art.
We may know the thing only when granted it by artists capable of
dispensing the enchantment of beauty, capable of laying on the tangible
trance, and there is no artist working today so capable as Joseph
Raffael. The exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery is a brilliant display
of Raffael's art, and of Raffael's thorough knowledge and command of
the essential reasons of art. The presentation of nine large-scale
watercolors from last year and this is a breathtaking and sparkling
outburst of the gentle and intimately exacting virtuosity that has
characterized Raffael's work throughout a now long career and in a
medium that he has made his own, that in today's art world bears the
stamp of his name. The majority of the paintings render the artist's
signature subject: scenes of nature in a soft repose : visions, more
than images, of quiet water, ponds and lilies, flowers and trees.
Such scenes are familiar. Yet, in the artist's signature
manner, the familiarity is nothing, for every scene has been
transformed into something stunning, enthralling, nearly blinding in
its intensity of sight. These paintings are geysers to the eye,
blossoming lusters of flourishing hues, of dawning liquid intricacies
in sheening chromatics, of incandescent glisterings. They glisten and
vibrate, shimmer as if all the moments and touches of color were stars
and as if stars were jewels, gemstones set in spectral radiance to
rainbow the heavens, to pock it with incisions and stabs of the genius
of pure tone : constellations of vividness brought to a focus so
perfect, a sharpness of such precision, that the apparent distances
nearly astral in their effect seem to fold down, to close in and
approach, to encompass and you become the very glistening you see. With
each passage of color, with each leaf and reflection of light and blade
of grass and fern, the eye brightens at its touch. Distinctive to this
exhibition is a new subject in Raffael's work. Last year, the artist
began a series of paintings titled Scenes from a Life. They are images
of his personal living and working environment that constitute, in the
words of the press materials, a "current autobiography in paint." The
four works from the series on display : Scenes from a Life: The Open
Window, 2001, Scenes from a Life: Studio Wall, 2001, Scenes from a
Life: Bookcase, 2001, and Scenes from a Life: The Doorway, 2001 : are
all interior views, views of his studio, his house, his garden seen
through a window, his wife, Lannis, stepping into their home.
Appropriate to their subject, these works are painted in a manner
different from Raffael's usual dazzling precision : they are looser in
touch, quicker in movement, faster in spirit, as if life were caught in
the midst of motion, a moment of happenstance in the center of a
continuous action, nothing stabilized, nothing standing pat. Almost
nothing, and not everything, for in all these works there are passages
of Raffael nature, moments of flowers and growth spied through windows
and doorways, encased in a mirror or mounted in a vase on a desk. And
in those places, we see the typical and unearthly precision of the
artist's hand, and the quality of a strange and mysterious arrest, of a
seeming permanence under the shifting flow of nature. And in that
strange arrest, that vision fixed in the almost blinding and stellar
exactitude that is carried by everything from Raffael's hand, there is
something else. There is a sense of a presence in the scenes, something
within the utterly natural and yet fully unnatural precision of these
visions, within them and yet standing behind them, something infusing
them and revealed through them. There is an unerring sense of something
revealed within, and through, the beauty. Something or someone is
hidden there, secret in the midst of a precision of rendering so clear,
one would think it could hide nothing. There is a spirit to these
works, and in them, something of the spirit seems to enter the image,
and seems to enter the viewer through the image, as if they showed you
something they do not show. And Raffael knows it, for he has titled the
painting that is the centerpiece of the exhibition: Spirit Entry, 2002.
It is an extraordinary display of ability and vision, bristling with
energy and the blatant and impossibly intricate facts of blossoms, and
greenery, and tree bark, and water so active it seems to be built of
billowing leaves. And something is enacted in the work, as if the
natural world were a single entity rising up before us, its energy
stable even as it moves. In the exacting execution of Spirit Entry, as
with all of Raffael's works, there is a vibrancy, a quality of energy
almost furious and yet quietly present. It is a vision mystics have
known and of which they have told us : the vision seers have seen when
objects begin to waver, and wave like ocean tops, and flow even as they
stand. And within it, there is something unseen, something youthful and
innocent, something T. S. Eliot wrote of in his last, mystical poem
"The Four Quartets": "Sudden in a shaft of sunlight/Even while the dust
moves/There rises the hidden laughter/Of children in the foliage." This
sensing of the presence, this quality of otherness in the obvious, is
what Robert Musil, the great twentieth-century German writer, called
"taghelle Mystik," a mysticism as bright as daylight. It is what one
sees in every work by Raffael : an illumination that is not an
obsfucation, a realization fully known, fully aware, fully alert.
Nothing is dreamy, and yet everything is as if from a dream. Here, we
see the transport of precision, the sudden dizzying transition of
exactitude, of a clarity impossibly clear. What Raffael delivers is an
intensification of vision to the eye, and as the eye increases in
power, all it gives increases: the delicacy of the vision intricates,
the mood bathes, the peacefulness suffuses, and the incursion grows
evident to our most secret senses, grows undeniable. This is the
remittance of beauty, and the remittance of the paintings of Joseph
Raffael: a recognition of what beauty retains and reveals, a
recognition of what is right before our eyes and yet observed only by
all our senses when captured in a trance by beauty set. It is a hard
lesson and a strenuous observation, one we can almost bear. It is the
lesson of vision transformed : of water in sunlight, of flowers, and
leaves, and secret laughter heard but in the heart of silence. And it
is the lesson that can be taught us only by the authentic artist.
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"
Joseph Raffael - Monumental Watercolors - NYREVIEW.COM
The critical state of visual art in New York - February 15, 2001
A touch of the enthrall: a delicacy wafts upon and lists to its
discretion, a spore that drifts the sea lanes of the air, a seed that waves
the densities of brightness and the light: pollen of the sensitivities
alighting on the pressure of the eye. A gentle sense that hovers in the
world become a mind: a feather weight that lifts up the imponderable breathe. We
see in it gentility of the impress. We see it in the beauty of the thing, of
anything of beauty. A causal form of ponder: the wonder of the gossamer, the
leavening of down, the patching of the wounding of the world, the bearing of
the weight. It settles in the cytoblast: the nuclear regard that comes to
bloom in the corolla, the flowering of lily floats, the spectral desiccation
of the carpet of the leaves.
Wherein is the portfolio of beauty? What are its prerogatives, its
actions,
its dependencies and purposes? What power does it sway, what is its
office?
In what is its authority and range of its discretion? What does beauty
do?
The business of the beauty of the thing is not in settlement. We
continue to
grapple with the matter. Even after more than 30 years of
experimentation in
new media, forms and purposes for art, we have come to no agreements
concerning beauty, not even as an obsolete issue. No development in art
has
laid aside the question of beauty's nature, the pertinence of its role,
and
it would seem that none is likely to. It is unlikely and it is
improbable,
not only for our lack of an agreement - the absence of our collusion on
not
only what beauty is and does, but also on what we see as beautiful. We
cannot come to see the same, to find the same things beautiful. And
more, we findourselves put back to the question by what we come upon
from artists:
continually they return to beauty, they constantly go back to the
enthrallment, to the felicity of the eye.
So,
what is it that remains? What is the essence of the drag of its
enthrall, the pull on us that will not permit us to leave it behind?
The discussionscontinue, and the prevailing thought is appropriate to
our time - a moment of academic cultural analysis that takes everything
we fashion, all our
creations and devices, all our instrumentalities, as symbolic codes for
maintaining and inculcating society's dominant systems of value. The
most
prevalent intellectual sense of beauty has it that beauty is a
convention,
and a recommendation. Beauty is socially defined and socially
specified, a
set of tacit agreements, an arbitrary body of formulas for visions and
sounds, which causes our astonishment through inurement. We react as we
do
to beautiful objects and visions because we have been immersed in a
culture like an agar, in an infection field of invisible judgments, and
we have been
trained throughout our lives through association with others who react
the
same way. In short, beauty is an accident, and a contagion. It is
whatever
our antecedents found it to be, and we have caught it from them. And
beauty's purpose is propaganda. Beauty is now taken by many as the
container
for the message, the wrapper that enchants, the sheen so attractive
that it
carries the ideas to which it adheres past all critical judgment,
convincing
people of the ideology it conveys through its native power of
mesmerization.
Beauty has become the Trojan Horse, the deceiving harbinger of
political
persuasion, the bringer of war to the mind, the bringer of the war for
the
mind.
But
artists such as Joseph Raffael, and few as much as Raffael, put us to
it. Raffael returns us to the question of the nature of beauty by the
most
authentic and irresistible of pleasurable constraints: by the sheer
potency,
the overwhelming power, of the beauty in his works. Over the course of
a
career long enough to surprise those only now coming to Raffael's work
- he
had his first solo exhibition in 1958 - this stunning painter has
taught his
viewers what the capabilities of watercolor painting truly are. For
Raffael
is known best, among those lucky enough to know of him, for creating
large,
glistening, limpid and brilliant and intimately detailed landscapes and
nature scenes - landscapes and nature in close up: fields of fallen
leaves,
lilies lying on the surfaces of ponds, flowing rivers, waterfalls,
individual blooms, and birds on branches. They are masterful watercolor
paintings, generally of a scale surprising for watercolor - frequently
his paintings measure over 60 inches in a dimension - that handle and
move the medium with the ambition and sweeping scope that would seem
the exclusive property of oils and acrylics. Raffael treats watercolors
as a medium for monumental painting, and for establishing monumental
delicacies.
Morning At Kodai, 2000
The
current exhibition at Nancy Hoffman of 13 paintings, all dating from
last year and this, divides into two formulas of composition and
aesthetic
intent. Eight of the works are traditional Raffael nature scenes. Each
is simply a ravishment, a vision of nature more than a nature scene, a
consecration of
nature to paint that bristles with colors in high value and vibrant
glow, a
visual report with full dedication to authenticity of the sheer
astonishment
felt in the face of the simple event of flowers, and birds, and still
and
flowing water. And these works, like every work I have seen from the
hand of
Raffael, when placed under the scrutiny of the probing eye reveal some
of
the tricks of his trade, the mechanisms of his style. Every work
evinces and is
executed in a severe depth of field: every last detail of every
painting is
in precise focus, nothing falls into the soft focus and hazy edging of
distances. In fact, all the compositional and rendering formulas of
perspective have been dispensed with, all but one. Some of the devices
have
even been reversed. In Morning At Kodai, 2000, the standard lighting
has
been inverted: the brightest point is not the nearest. Instead, the
darkest part
is the bottom of the painting, the portion of the scene closest to the
viewer, and the illumination grows lighter as the scene slips back
toward the middle distance.
Perspective is maintained - and there is strict perspective in everything I
have seen Raffael create - by the method based in draftsmanship: by changes
of scale. Similar objects grow smaller with a consistency that establishes
the orthogonal, and indicates the position of the vanishing point. The lily
pads in Morning At Kodai, the red blossoms in Along The Way, 2000, and the
dead leaves throughout All The Different Ages, 2001 recede in size as your
eye moves up the paintings, and demonstrate which way the recession falls.
In Aposh, 2001, there is the slightest change in scale between the branch on
which the bird sits and the branches that run on the upper right, a change
so slight to be almost undistinguishable but enough to maintain the sense of
foreground and background. In places, the shift in scale is so subtle as
nearly to plunge the composition into chaos. In Tigre's Spring, 2000, you
almost lose your sense of the cat buried in the stalled maelstrom of flowers
and weeds - almost, but not quite. The scale change remains, and it
accomplishes its work.
But
every other rule of perspective is broken, and broken to a purpose.
Everything else of the artist's work is precise and undeterred by the
mitigating facts of vision. Everything rushes forward as if the point
of
focus, as if intimately close. To see a Raffael painting is to see too
well,
to see preternaturally well, to see impossibly well, and to see the
impossible. These visions of nature are like melodies in which every
note is
heard and attended, in which nothing, not one moment, bleeds into the
general sense of the melody, in which you know everything and, by the
end, know it all at once. These visions are like moments in which the
scales have been
lifted from the eyes. These are visions of nature thoroughly natural,
and
thoroughly unnatural, fully realistic and fully unrealistic - fully
both at
the same time. It is this, this breaking of the codes for making
perspective, more than anything else about Raffael's paintings - more
than his glittering
brightness of color or his choice of scene or intimacy of observation -
that
is the heart of his style and the reason it works as it does.
With this exhibition, Raffael has added a new element to his roster of
effects. Five of the paintings include, in the heart of the composition,
Tibetan tankas, or mandalas, often with elements of drawn from nature before
them or around them, integrated with them to make the mandalas symbols,
presumably, of what Raffael finds in his viewings of nature: something of
the spirit, something of a religious import, and of a rapture. Though the tricks
and the efficacious trickery of Raffael's manipulations of perspective are
frequently lost in these works, they bear much of the same pleasure of
viewing as his other works - for the sake of their vivid applications of
color and the touch of the hand of this master. Even so, it is all a bit
heavy-handed, a little obvious, at least for the sake of using mandalas in a
culture that is foreign to them and that necessarily sees them as exotic,
which is entirely different from the esoteric; in fact, it is the opposite.
Mandalas come to us from the outside (exotic), not from the inside
(esoteric). It is all a bit heavy and blatant, and nowhere so much as in the
instance in which the mandala is occupied not by an image of nature but a
symbol of art. In View, 2000, the core of the tanka is not a bird or a
flower, but a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh.
View, 2000
And the touch of the hand of the master here does not help. Raffael's touch
has a certain wavering quality that attends to its precision, something
entirely germane to the use of watercolors and, far more important, to the
rendering of nature, for it carries the quality of the living shift, the
movement of life that can be seen under close observation in everything that
lives. Nothing alive stands perfectly still. That's how you know it's alive.
But in the mandalas, that wavering touch seems unproductive, and
inappropriate. There seems in them a geometry of the spiritual, and it
requires an extreme precision of rendering. Others do this sort of thing
better, and Raffael other things better still.
Even
so, if there is an artist who makes the case for beauty, and an
exhibition in New York at present that gives the demonstration of the
case,
it is this artist and this exhibition. Raffael's works are not
prettified
and not deliberately pleasant - not merely pleasant. The pleasure in
viewing
them is not a simple delectation of the felicity: visuals nicely put
and lapped up by the acquisitive eye, enjoyment in the gaze that is
nothing more than
enjoyable. There is a sense of import to these works - viewing injects
in its witness an intuition that something more is going on than just
what is being
seen. The pleasure of the paintings is almost diverting, almost a mask
covering over the real nature of the view, almost a feint. We learn
something of the deeper nature of these works, and something of the
deeper nature of
beauty, by asking why we find them beautiful. One can make a list of
their
attributes and at first this seems right. This roster seems a reason
for
their beauty, until one gives it some thought. Raffael's works are
brilliantly colorful, exquisitely drawn, vigorous and fluid with
detailed
observation and extreme care of rendering. They seem to be at the
height of
their medium, each one a lesson in how to paint. Who has handled
watercolors
substantially better?
Each of these attributes would seem a matter for and explanation of the
presence of beauty, until we think further. Why would they be? What is there
in any of them that is inherently a reason for beauty? More to the point, we
can all think of examples of artists who work with the opposite attributes
and who produce works of beauty. There are artists who paint in dulled hues
and create beauty, artists who apply vague and ill-defined draftsmanship and
who accomplish it, and above all, artists who work without the observation
from nature, who operate exclusively from the interior of the mind, and who
manage beauty.
Wherein is beauty's portfolio? The very listing of the attributes of
Raffael's style that would seem the itemization of the beauty in his work is
no justification of their beauty. No listing of attributes, no itemization,
could ever justify or explain the encountering of beauty. Every beautiful
detail of any work of any art might have had a different effect, which
renders our disagreements over what is beautiful completely moot. If we all
agreed, it would explain nothing.
This is the anomaly in the thought, the moment it turns wrong. The logic
does not reverse. Break down an instance of beauty to its parts, add the parts
together again, and you do not return to beauty. Two divides into one and
one, but add one and one and you do not get two. Something else is going on
here.
But, as with all things, the anomaly is the revelation. When something
refuses to make sense, that is the sense it makes. The failure of the
itemization of beauty is the heart of the explanation. In fact, something
else is going on here. The beauty many of us, if not all of us, would find in
the works of Joseph Raffael is not in the vibrancy of the colors or the
precision of observation or even the distinctive manipulation of the methods
of perspective. These are all means to an end, but they are not components of
that end. They are approaches to beauty, but not beautiful matters unto
themselves. They could as well have led to something thoroughly hideous. But,
from Raffael's hand, they don't, which tells us that beauty is something
acquired, something achieved after reaching a threshold point in the
development of means and style, something new that enters in for a reason
beyond reasoning, and not just a summary conclusion of partial stylistic
devices and effects. Beauty comes at a certain point and it comes as
something new, something added on.
Which
is to note that beauty is its own attribute, and, in any meaningful
sense of the word, a matter of content, not style: a thing unto
itself,explained only by reference to itself. Nothing else accounts for
it,
no itemization counts it up. And to say it is content is to say that
beauty
is its own message. Beauty is not a glittering wrapper that can be
bound
around a message that is something other and might have been anything
at
all, it is not a glistening conviction injected into a polemic that
thereby might bypass all critical disinclination. Beauty in itself
means something.
Means what, exactly what? As the appearance of beauty does not arrive as a
summation of attributes, so it is not a summary of other thoughts. As the
look of it does not come of piecemealing the facts, so it is not an instance
of the mental match for the facts: an idea, built up other ideas, as all
ideas are. (Ideas are distinguished from other mental contents by their
genealogies; every idea possesses an intellectual genealogy, that is what
tells them apart from mere opinions.)
But
there are other forms of meaning, other than ideas. Ideas in themselves
may be nothing more than dead leaves: scraps of facts thought upon and
lying
inert and dormant, lifeless items littering the mind. They may imply
the
observations and prior ideas they came from, and carry the import of
what
they logically imply - but they may only imply logically. They may be
merely
thought upon - or they may be appreciated, sympathetically sensed for
the
quality of vibrancy, the sense of internal life they acquired from that
which engendered them: the experience in the living world from which
they came and to which they refer. Ideas may be listings of dead facts
of observation, or
they may render a living vision of a living universe. They may be alive
in
the mind, they may be poetic symbols, artistic images: they themselves
maybe beautiful. That sense of life they carry like an infection of
vitality is a
meaning, as well: the meaning of beauty.
That
meaning is as easy to learn as any, for it is everywhere around us, and
as difficult to possess as anything is. It requires tutelage, the
tutelage
of artists, artists who are intelligent enough not to polemicize their
experience and argue their arguments, who have realized it is their
business
to return the world to us as something alive, as something vital and
stunning in its vision and encounter, as something brilliant and almost
blinding in its splendor, as something like us in our own vibrancy:
something miraculous. It requires artists who know it is their vocation
to show the miracle, the
balm of the astonishment that cures the wound of the world, that buoys
the
weight of it. That is knowledge, too - it must be, for it is wisdom.
It requires tutelage, the lessons of a master, of a master artist. There is
no one who teaches this now so well as Raffael, and nowhere can this
imperative lesson, this lesson of urgency, be learned so well as at the Nancy
Hoffman Gallery, in an exhibition that should be seen now, right now.
By Mark Daniel Cohen
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