tailieunhanh - From painting to sculpture and back again

The surface texture of the wax paintings and the mummy sculptures is similar. The gauze only becomes visible intermittently, the plaster on top of it having much the same appearance as wax. The various patinating agents, brown, green, red, white and black mix together to form an undulating surface, something like the bark of a tree which invites the onlooker to touch. Marie, Vito and Balzac are the foundation that many of the later sculptures are built on. The subsequent sculptures can be understood as a documentation of the working process, as a revolving creative system in which the foregoing sculptures provide feedback and input for the next. “I. | From painting to sculpture and back again For Julian Schnabel art is boundless. His personality and his work are direct and spontaneous. Art and life flow into each other simply and effortlessly. The free choice of subject matter underscores Schnabel s conviction that anything can be the model for a painting or a sculpture. I try to surprise myself. I ve never made anything to illustrate what I already knew. I had to make it in order to find out what it was . At age 26 he wrote I want my life to be embedded in my work crushed into my painting like a pressed car .1 This already sounds like sculpture although Schnabel would make a name for himself as a painter in the subsequent five years. His paintings have many different appearances. There is an order to them that can help us understand more about the origin of his sculptures. The first group of paintings that can be attributed to the artist s mature work were done in the second half of the seventies and are referred to collectively as the wax paintings. Variously abstract like Shoeshine for Wttorio de Sica 1976 or diagrammatically figurative such as Accattone 1978 they are marked by the flatness of the drawing on them a topography of the surface of the painting rather than an attempt to fill it in. The image is on a skin which belongs to the body of the painting and which also consists of the wax in the paint and holes protrusions and undulations. Three-dimensionality gives the canvases presence and illustrates the conflict between the pictorial and the physical which is a constant quality of Schnabel s work. An instructive example that just predates the wax paintings is This is Luke Talbot 1975. It does not look like a painting or even a sculpture. The plate paintings continue to examine painting s objectness and its relationship to the image drawn on it. The plates break up the image but at the same time have a unifying effect on the painting as a whole. They provide a skeleton on which the paint can be applied