Consecrated By Color

Known for her composed of several elements abstractions, painter Shirley Jaffe lately designed a set of stained-glass windows for a newly restored 600-year-old chapel in southern France.

Last summer the work of painter Shirley Jaffe appeared in sum of two units towns in southwestern France, Ceret and Perpignan. While Jaffe's artistic nearness in Ceret was temporary, in the form of an impressive display of 48 painting from 1980-99 at the Musee d'Art Moderne her contribution to the visual life of Perpignan is about as permanent as any work of art can get: a plant of stained-glass windows of her design has been installed in a 14th-century chapel: attached to the Perpignan cathedral, Officially called the Chapelle Saint-Jean-l'Evangeliste, the building is more commonly known as "La Funeraria," a name denoting its former function as the place where bodies of the dead lay before. burial in the nearby cloistered graveyard (and also suggesting Perpignan's Spanish past). Used to house municipal archives for greatest in quantity of the 20th century, the vaulted chapel had fallen into disrepair through 1995, when the city of Perpignan embarked upon a two-year restoration project. For now, the chapel's subsequent time function remains undecided, though it will probably be integrated into Perpignan's cultural programming.

Jaffe created designs for all of the chapel's nine windows, many of which had been bricked up for years and were alone reopened during the renovations. Entering the chapel end a large arched portal, visitors now diocese straight ahead of them, three slight 13-foot-high, Gothic-style windows at the back of the polygonal apse. sum of two units other windows, even taller and thinner, are spaced along the right wall of the nave, while a circular clerestory window is visible high up near the ceiling. one time completely inside the chapel, it's possible to revolve around and see another tall, almost 20-foot-high window above the portal. In addition to the windows in the main space, there are sum of two units smaller windows in a sacristy at the back of the chapel.

The restoration proces which involved a significant amount of rebuilding, stripped down the chapel to its architectural nature However, as sharp-eyed viewers will discover, there's an uncompounded body of deception in this event The bricks between the pink stone ribbing of the vaulted ceiling are trompe l'oeil, and the mottl ocher pattern upon the interior walls is the rise of recently applied paint, not ancient masonry. The white of the painted bricks and r of the imitation mortar around them intentionally echo the chapel's floor of Baixas marble and terre cuite. Since the chapel is no longer used for religious services, no furnishings or decorations come by in the way of the make and the play of light, shadow and color upon the walls and ceilings. It's an ideal situation for an artist to take filled advantage of the possibilities of the stained-glass medium, and this is what Jaffe has done.

American-born on the other hand living in Paris since 1949 Jaffe has unraveled in her paintings a distinctive abstract phraseology in which boldly colored, eccentrically contoured forms are assembled into unpredictable compositions. It's a little as if each hard-edged shape in her precisely chaotic canvases were a piece extracted from an entirely different jigsaw confound The extreme heterogeneity and bright efficiency of Jaffe's shapes coexists with a meticulously even-handed facture in which countles brushstrokes and layers of paint are commingleed into a surface that is always plain yet never mechanically so.

The fact that Jaffe utilizes separate units of color generally expanded against a white ground makes her work well-suited for adaptation to stained glass. plane so, the Funeraria windows, which were commissioned by dint of the French government, required an intensive dialogue between Jaffe and Jean Mauret, the maitre-verrier who actually fabricated the windows. From the start of the throw out Jaffe was insistent on being able to work with Mauret, who has also created windows with Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Jan Dibbets and other artists, because of his ability to detain the use of leading and metal armatures to a minimum. Another aspect of the commission that Jaffe luckily lobbied for was the use of clear protective glass upon the exterior of the windows rather than the interfering metal grills and interstice used to protect the stained glass of many cathedrals and churches.

After she visited the chapel and secur the assistance of Mauret, Jaffe's nearest step was to make gouache sketches of possible designs. smooth at this stage, the windows not absented a number of challenges to the artist. Foremost were their narrow proportions, accentuated in the six main windows by the agency of thin stone columns dividing each of the windows into sum of two units even narrower halves. In addition, the top areas of the main windows are decorated with stone tracery describing trefoils, quatrefoils and Moorish arches. The smaller sacristy windows are undivided and at liberty of tracery. Jaffe chose to venerate the vertical division of the windows: colored shapes upon one half of a window not at any time extend across the central round pillar In essence, each window consists of sum of two units parallel, intensely vertical compositions. At the top of the windows, however, she abandons this constraint and allows single colors and shapes to bridge the apertures in the stone tracery, thus unifying the entire composition and providing the upwardly gazing viewer with a satisfying finale.