Month: October 2016

Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli, “Summer Noon – L – 20”, 1968, Oil , Canvas and Burlap Collage on Canvas, 56 x 72 Inches

Conrad Marca-Relli was an American artist born in Boston who belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionism. Along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, Marca-Relli was part of the leading art movement of the postwar era.

In 1930 at the age of seventeen, Marca-Relli studied for one year at the Cooper Union, a private arts and science college. He later worked at the Works Progress Administration (WPA) first as a teacher and then painting murals with the Federal Art Project division. After serving in World War II, he taught at Yale University during 1954 and 1955, later teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, during 1959 and 1960.

Marca-Relli’s early still lives, cityscapes and circus paintings are reminiscent of the surrealist work of Giorgio de Chirico. He created many large scale collages throughout his career, combining oil paint with collage, using intense colors, broken surfaces, and splatters of paint in an expressionistic style. His later works showed a simplicity with black or somber colors and more rectangular shapes with neutral backgrounds.

Sandú Darié

Sandú Darié, Untitled, 1950, Oil on Canvas

Sandú Darié was a Romanian artist who grew up in France and initially trained as a lawyer. He had many contacts with the Romanian avant-garde, Including the poet Stephan Roll and the painter Medi W. Dinu. After spending some time in Paris, he settled in Havana, Cuba, in 1941, taking Cuban nationality.

Darié belonged to the South American Neo-Constructivist movement. He was also a member of the Diez Pintores Concretos group (The Ten Concrete Painters). This group with its development of Cuban abstract geometric art conincided with the radical political and cultural shifts that raged throughout Cuba in the 1950s. In Darié’s compositions, the triangle predominated in combination with vertical and horizontal lines. Interchangeable mobile panels also provided the physical structure for his works.

The basic tenets of Concrete Art was evident in his works with the combinations of planes, primary colors and rigorous geometric form. His use of irregular shaped canvases and structures with moving parts broke the existing tradition of painting and focused on the physicality of the art. Darié drew the viewer into his works with its space, color and light, encouraging the viewer to participate in its perspective and motion.

D. Baretto

D. Baretto, “Cycling Trivialities”, Computer Graphics, Animation Gifs

D. Baretto graduated from the School of Fine Arts/ Tufts in Boston in 2016 with a BFA concentrating in illustration, animation and digital installation. He works from his studio, “Studio Barro”, locatied in Guadalajara, Mexico. Baretto has been directing several animation videos for musicians and brand-name commissions.

 

 

Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana, Three Paintings from the Hartley Elegies Series

Robert Indiana’s Hartley Elegies (1989-1994) is a series of 18 paintings, grouped into three formats, rectangular, diamond and tondo. A poignant meditation on identity and loss, they are the most recent of his homages to American artists and poets, and were inspired by Marsden Hartley’s War Motif series, which Hartley executed as a tribute to the young German soldier Karl von Freyburg, who died during World War I and with whom Hartley had a deep friendship.

Indiana employs Hartley’s stylized visual language throughout the Elegies, while reinvesting them with additional content and meaning. He weaves references to Hartley and von Freyburg with allusions to himself, to places and historical events with overlapping symbolic meanings, forming a web linking his life to Hartley’s.

KvF I, the first of Indiana’s Elegies, (the first image above) is based on Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer (1914), which Indiana had seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Indiana’s painting is a close interpretation of the work, faithfully incorporating the motifs of German World I pageantry and references to von Freyburg found in Hartley’s painting. These include the Iron Cross, which von Freyburg was awarded just before his death, the numeral 4, the number of von Freyburg’s regimen, the numeral 24, the age of von Freyburg at his death, and von Freyburg’s initials, KvF.

Indiana also employs the red, green, black, white, blue and yellow color scheme of Portrait of a German Officer, however he transforms Hartley’s thick brushwork and muted tones into his signature hard-edged lines and bright saturated color. He also adds a significant motif, a large central ring containing text, which is found in many of the subsequent Elegies.

In KvF I Karl von Freyburg’s name is spelled out in white letters in the top half, and the date October 7 appears between the years 1914 and 1989 in the bottom half. October 7, 1914 was the date of von Freyburg’s death and October 7, 1989 the date, exactly seventy-five years later, that Indiana began working on the Elegies. By including the latter date Indiana inserts himself into the series and links himself to Hartley and von Freyburg, asserting his kinship with the men.

Eyes Behind Fingers

Photographer Unknown, (Eyes Behind Fingers”, Portrait

“In order to understand today’s world, we need cinema, literally. It’s only in cinema that we get that crucial dimension which we are not ready to confront in our reality. If you are looking for what is in reality more real than reality itself, look into the cinematic fiction.”

—Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema