Of our three artists Garcia is the only one who has painted the same city relentlessly for decades. And as Dykes points out, Garcia’s constant examination of the familiar rises above the merely local or anecdotal. The artist seizes the individuality of the subjects he paints but cuts beneath the surface and to their essence. Perhaps this is an important aspect of their surreal quality: the paradox of their being solidly rooted in the real, physical world, and yet belonging to a geometrical, platonic, deserted one as well. That this fusion of the material and immaterial - the mysterious and the everyday - is accomplished seamlessly by looking and painting, by the use of simple pigments applied by hand, only accentuates the viewer’s awareness of the paradox. According to Garcia this is a central notion to the tradition he is heir of: “Spanish art is the ability to look at the world and express the most mysterious ideas without manipulation, using only ‘human materials.’”[i]
This brings us back to Harold Rosenbergs’s distinction between the new Photo-Realists of the seventies and what he called “older" forms of representation created out of “the sensibility of a single individual developed over years of looking and drawing. . ." If Rosenberg’s distinction was relevant in 1973, it is even more so today. The proliferation of digital photos has flooded our culture with more images than one could have imagined in the 1970's. Photoshop and computer visualization programs have made the manipulation and creation of these images possible for just about anyone with a PC. The magic of producing visual illusion seems to have become a common, democratic process. But visualization programs, while they allow for the creation of photo-like pictures, generate their imagery from a pre-determined set of functions. The resulting images are a direct referent to the computer program itself, just as much or more than to the external world or the imaginative faculties of the user. Popular phenomena like Instagram have allowed for the mass manipulation and cookie-cutter aestheticization of these photos. But digital images, at their root, are mere binary codes produced by pre-determined mechanical processes with predictable results. The effort required to make them is negligible: they are almost infinitely reproducible and therefore disposable.
Being bombarded by this flood of electronic images has the potential to numb our awareness of the obdurate world around us, and of the complexities of how we actively perceive that world in the flesh. The experience of viewing digital pictures can become something which seems disembodied: this in contrast to the experience of seeing objects made in the physical world through direct sensory perception with physical materials. While strict Photo-Realist paintings are hand-made images with a precise semblance to objects in the world, their basic referent is the photographic image. As we have seen, Downes, Richter and Lopez Garcia distinguish themselves from this kind of painting, working in ways that are more open and responsive to the dynamics of optical experience. And yet their methods never (or rarely) give way to complete subjectivity - but maintain a rigorous parallel to the objective world and the depiction of actual sites, objects or events.
In the decades since the seventies a different kind of photo-based painting has emerged to the forefront, less beholden to the original image than Photo-Realism and more open to the subjective intent and response of the artist. This would include painters such as Luc Tuymans, Elizabeth Payton, Eric Fischl, and Marlene Dumas. Often these pictures are figurative, and the imagery taken from the original source photos becomes transformed on the canvas by the painterly, narrative or expressive concerns of the artist. On the one hand we could say that these artists share with Downes, Richter and Garcia a more open approach to representation than the Photo-Realists. Yet on the other hand, such painting generally fails to produce a phenomenological parallel between the world, perception, and the canvas in the same way that Downes, Garcia, and Richter do.
With Richter’s work, the visible signs left over from the artist’s motor impulse create a form of expressive communication not because they record his state of mind while painting, but because they act directly on our optical system. The referent for Richter’s representational work is neither his own inner emotion nor the photograph in its material form, rather it is the photographic process itself; and by extension those things which the process of photography share in common with the processes of human vision. Using paint to explore the relationship between the object, optical/technical equipment and perception, he recreates a direct metaphor for how we see through various depths of field in space. But in many of these paintings our eye is denied any final resolution to the problem: the visual field becomes impenetrable, and the resulting confusion of depth by blurring causes us to doubt the existence of the object, evoking the illusion of immateriality.
While these canvases do suggest incorporeality, I would say that they also elicit a more bodily response than digitally altered images that deal with selective focus. Richter’s blurs, scrapes, and wipes are made by hand out of oil paint, a medium which shows more resistance to manipulation than digital or photographic media, but which also allows for greater adjustment and subtlety in situ by the painter. The artist is able to vary where and how vision is altered according to his sensibility in the moment of painting, rather than according to a pre-existing system. This permits him to create more perceptual tension in the optical system of the viewer than is possible with images produced by the fixed processes of digital operations. Also, the fact that the final image is made of a material medium - one that leaves traces of the kinesthetic actions of an embodied being - calls our attention even more to the physicality of its nature. The medium’s physical resistance to manipulation acts as a counterpoint to its apparent incorporeality, heightening the sense of dematerialization.
While this kind of obscurity aligns his work closely with the Romantic tradition - Richter’s main connection to the sublime isn’t his appropriation or mimicry of 19th century styles or formats: Rather it is that he produces pictures that consistently transcend logical explanation on the visual level. This element of the supra-rational in Richter lends itself to rich imaginative interpretation, especially when he is dealing with subjects like Dr. Heyde or Sils Maria which call to mind - either implicitly or explicitly – memories of Germany’s mid-twentieth century history.
Downes makes no explicit metaphorical connection to the history of Europe in his work, yet his British upbringing influences the narrative perspective he takes on the American landscape. While Richter tends to use imagery of a more pastoral, picturesque, or romantic character - Downes, who grew up in England and seeing nature as a place where people worked - explores the interaction of the natural world and human industry as it exists at a specific time in the present. In contrast to Richter but Downes ends-up emphasizing the physicality of the subject in all its particulars. Richter wipes away details in an attempt to find the essential: Downes strives to portray the minute within the overall structure of the grand, like the Flemish painters whom he admires.
There is something incarnational about Downes’ work. Of our three artists he is the one with his feet most firmly planted in the earth, and he brings us into an experience of the factual materiality of the motif in ways not possible with merely mechanical or digital modes of representation. We see the world through his intense concentration on the subject. This focus is mental, visual and physical. Things such as blades of grass and their exact angle, size and color, or the intricate silhouette of a line of trees against the sky become important because they have all been closely perceived and then painted by hand with close attention to their individual characteristics. This process of constant observation and analysis results in thousands of inter-related decisions about hue, tone, shape and proportion in every painting. Each mark is a kinesthetic gesture left on the canvas connected to all the others: not so much a record of the artist’s emotional state, but rather - in sum – they are the result of his prolonged contemplation of objects as they are in the obdurate world.
At times Downes hits social or environmental themes, as in his painting of the Fresh Kills Landfill. Yet the power of his work to probe such issues rests firmly on its visual qualities, which draw us into an awareness of the painted surface as a metaphor of being in the direct presence of the landscape. As in Tennis Courts in Riverside Park, at 119th Street, tone and hue shifts over the surface of the canvas speak not only of local color, but also of optical changes in the perception of light which occur as the eye scans the landscape under the sun outdoors. In many of his pictures the hue of the sky varies substantially across the canvas because of different atmospheric conditions. Blues, light browns, cool pinks and grey-greens shift into one another as the artist pans around his environment relative to the position of the sun: now into, now away from its glare. These kinds constant variations save Downes’ paintings from the rut of mere replication and raise it toward a kind of meditation on the nature of perception itself.
Downes’ program of accurately fitting every bit of proportional truth into these broad, sweeping panoramas forces him to deal with changes in vision as the eye and body move to look. This often results in vertiginous lines and angles, tilting and arcing horizons, and whole compositions that seem to wrap around the viewer. Yet Downes accomplishes these effects with varied kinds of contours: some straight, some curving gently and others bending in more extreme ways. His images are very different from those produced by wide-angle cameras whose results are pre-determined by the physical shape of the lens. Downes’ horizons never leave us in doubt about the reality of the earth under our feet as images produced by fish-eye lenses can. These lenses often distort the horizon-line into something no longer immediately recognizable as the ground plane. The painter re-creates the tension of stretched out perspectives while guarding the solid feeling of the earth beneath us, the wholeness of the visual field, and our sense of the integrity of gravity. Here once again Downes is able to make intuitive adjustments about how we apprehend reality more convincingly and consistently than optical and digital machines can.
While Downes’ work emphasizes the material and Richter’s the immaterial, Lopez Garcia strikes a delicate balance between the two. He paints directly from the motif like Downes; but takes a much longer period of time to complete his paintings, as much as two decades. The kinds of changes he is forced to make as the landscape evolves result in visible petimenti through various layers of paint. At the same time, like his British contemporary, he pays a great amount of attention to the mapping out of specific objects and actual spaces, but where Downes’ surfaces are more solid, Garcia’s touch is light and atmospheric, with various kinds of marks over different parts of the painting insinuating different kinds of visual acuity and various layers of execution. These variations imply changes in depth of field, in foveal and peripheral vision, and create a dynamic sense of flux and temporality; this in contrast with the more staid painting of a Photo-Realist like Richard Estes, or even the pragmatic Downes.
Unlike Downes however, Lopez Garcia doesn’t shy away from attempting to record his own emotional response to the landscape. We saw this most notably in his painting View of Madrid from Vellecas Fire Tower, where he over-painted the canvas away from the motif in order to inflect its surface with this kind of subjectivity. Yet these more subjective marks still seem premeditated to achieve a very optical effect; they can be a dense matrix of dashes, calligraphic stabs and impasti. Other marks are more open and airy; there are scumbles, glazes and thin lines, some even in pencil. These contrasts move the eye through a Garcia landscape in a way that parallels how we move our eyes thorough the visual field in the three dimensional world. Some passages appear to be at a different focal depth than others. Other areas mimic foveal perception, in contrast to passages which evoke peripheral vision. The result is that while his paintings convey the impression of density and completion, they also suggest a constant state of flux or development.
With Lopez-Garcia, like Downes, we are drawn into the artist’s activity of observing and painting. Lopez’s distinctive hand, and the layers of petimenti form a kind of residue; visible traces of his concentrated involvement with the subject. The surface becomes much more than a factual reportage of the observed world. In Garcia’s best work what we are finally left with is the record of the artist’s own phenomenological experience, accretions of pigment representing the hours and years which he has spent in the presence of the things he has painted, and like the seventeenth century Spanish masters which Garcia admires, these pictures become philosophical reflections on the world, both material and mystical - mediated by the artist’s eye, mind and hand.
In the same way that Downes described the “unofficial” artists of the sixties as re-inspecting the past in order to invent their “own tradition," each of our three painters has mined a particular vein within the history of European painting in order to help form his own practice. Richter, Downes and Garcia have never corresponded or worked together; their aesthetic goals diverge widely in many ways, and yet there is an essential, common thread shared between them. That thread has been a major theme in Western painting since the Renaissance. Across almost six centuries a considerable part of the fabric of European painting has been its phenomenological bent: how the individual painter experiences life by seeing. Consisting of a scientific study of the world, an exploration of optics, and the artist’s own response to both through the act of painting, this aspect of the Western tradition has been used in a powerful way to bring mythological, political and religious narratives to life. But from Van Eyeck to Velazquez and Chardin to Manet the pursuit of phenomenological experience has also proved to be a viable form of painterly expression in and of itself.
With mechanical means of representation having largely replaced painting as the major cultural form of image making - for both informational and aesthetic purposes - it would be easy to assume that the medium of oil paint is destined to move away from this kind of objective, phenomenological approach, to become either a form of clever photo-counterfeiting or a retreat into the subjective realm of individual expression. But the works of Richter, Downes and Garcia seem to prove otherwise. Maintaining a rigorous hold on both the objective world and personal visual experience, each painter has proved in his own way that a six-hundred year old medium, manipulated directly by the artist’s hand, is in many ways still more effective at conveying the dynamics of perception than more technologically advanced media.
Such painting is more timely than ever. In an era where we are increasingly surrounded by artificial images it becomes easy to ignore the actual world around us and how we see it. We now look at digital screens to accomplish tasks at work, to communicate with each other, to entertain ourselves and even to seek aesthetic experiences. If seeing is a substantial part of how we understand reality - both cognitively and emotionally - then perhaps being enveloped in a myopic, virtual “space” carries with it the potential danger of leaving us with a withered capacity to feel deeply about the world around us. It is significant thing that these three artists have chosen to paint in a way that engages our sense of sight - evoking many of the complexities and tensions of how we actively perceive corporeal objects in three dimensional space. In some vicarious way they draw us into their own experience of careful, thoughtful seeing. Their work is a much needed reminder for us to be aware of the actual world around us, and to look intently.
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