Word: raffael
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Dates: during 1973-1973
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...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...
...photographs Raffael used had an obvious function: they froze time. Pictures of this size (some 6 ft. by 9 ft.) cannot readily be made by setting up an easel beside some river in northern California; only Monet, with his unequaled powers of observing and retaining a fleeting effect of light and movement, could paint his water-lily murals in open air at Giverny with gardeners struggling to haul the vast 19-ft. canvases in and out of his studio. But Raffael's images are not ruled by their starting point in the photo. They are recreation, not enlargement; between...
...observes this water bubbling over falls and ledges, moving icily above its brown pebbles or taking the sky like a slightly ominous and broken sheet of mercury, the illusionistic skill is impressive. But the real life of these paintings comes from Raffael's ability to take a slice of river and, by giving it absolute presence, turn it into the stuff of contemplation. The Water Paintings are lyrical considerations of time and mutability, as well as matter. "You cannot," Heraclitus remarked, "step into the same river twice"-an observation that a later Greek sophist neatly amended: "You cannot step...