Word: raffael
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...Raffael had long painted isolated images based on photos clipped from magazines. Blown up to large scale, the objects were rich in color and thinly painted, "realistic" and yet imbued with a mescaline intensity. He found that California did not so much alter his style as allow him to work less self-consciously within it. For Water Paintings, begun in 1972, he used photos of trout, river surfaces and rapids in northern California snapped by Allan, an enthusiastic fly fisherman...
Deadpan Images. Raffael's use of photos has created, in some quarters, the impression of an affinity with the much touted American "New Realism." Not so. The neorealist effort-air-brushed Volkswagen bumper bars, Los Angeles parking lots, horse postcards, the whole post-Pop iconography of deadpan images-is merely an absent-minded rumination on fact, painting reduced to bland, mechanical transliteration. The method precludes light and atmosphere, and silences all dialogue between brush-work and image. New Realism is the limp, ineloquent salon...
...contrast, Raffael is obsessed by light, its sparkle and sheen and transparency. The subjects of his earlier paintings seem to have been chosen to show what happens to light on every sort of surface-the hammered gold of a chalice, the sleek moist interior of an oyster or the pock-marked ivory of a hornbill's beak. Raffael undertook an inspection of their varied skins on the level, if not of the cell, at least on that of the pore. Each point where light hit the tiniest break of texture or color was set down in a curious, tightly...
...legible form seems governed by a single hair of the brush: a painter's metaphor of the universal eye of God, marking the sparrow's fall. Perhaps that option is not open to a modern artist since the assumptions behind it no longer exist. In any case, Raffael (who, like any other young artist in New York in the '50s, was affected by Abstract Expressionism) wanted to keep handwriting-the visible gesture of the brush, done in and for itself-in his work. A large part of his enterprise over the past several years has been both...
...Water Paintings are the freest images Raffael has so far made, and by far the most poetic. The blots, scribbles and stains of the paint-closely worked and yet oddly abstract, as if performed in a trance-are analogues to the liquidity of water itself. Paint "equals" water in much the same way as, in some Renaissance portraiture, the graininess of pigment "equals" the cellular structure of flesh...