Joseph Raffael at Nancy Hoffman - art exhibition - Brief Article

For more than a decade, the Brooklyn-born, Yale-educated painter Joseph Raffael has made his dwelling in Antibes, a seaport in the southern of France. Ten of his large watercolors upon exhibit in this show, painted in 1998 and 1999 indicated that the experience of splendid luminosity in nature, key to the appreciation of his art, owes a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to his place of residence. At the same time, the translucency which animates these repeatedly admirable landscape studies results from the artist's positive control of his medium. Raffael's approach to watercolor has not changed plenteous over the course of his career, on the other hand his composition's structural aspects and brilliant tints make the viewing of his art an interesting and pleasurable experience.

Painting upon heavy Arches paper, Raffael makes use of many different colors--as many as 20 to 30 shades of azure for example--in a single composition. The tonal complexities of his palette are emphasized through the size of the works: a certain quantity of are diptychs with the outsize dimensions of 88 through 61 inches. In Gateway: Nature (1999) a diptych studying heavy foliage in Karala, southern India, the 7-foot height of the painting enables Raffael to paint the intricacies of nature at almost life size. Up shut the viewer feels nearly able to walk into the forest. The center of the painting, illuminated by means of bright sunshine, emphasizes the leaves' light gold-coloreds and greens, and also whirls the slender, dark brown verticals of the tree into vigorous relief. The elements themselves are small on the contrary build across the picture plane with mosaiclike complexity.

In Autumn (1998) a profusion of orange-yellow maple leaves chiefly overwhelms the trunk of the tree which splits into sum of two units about halfway up the work. The trunk's colors, down-reaching purple and black, strikingly contrast with the sharp-edged brightness of the dying leaves. single senses that the intense particularity of this image arises from the fact that Raffael works with photographs when he paints. This is a tree in of recent origin York's Central Park. The diptych Mystery Eternal (1999) is based upon photographs taken at the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena. Raffael tenders a partial view of a pond edged by rocks with brush hanging above the water. The reflection of r and virid foliage in the water is returned in a series of S-shaped swirls; that bit of motion, complet by the agency of mostly horizontal brushwork, animates what otherwise would have been a straightforward view. Raffael's skilful technique pulls it off.

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