Painting snapshots, or the cursory spectacle - paintings by Robert Bechtle and Eric Fischl

Painting, that strange amalgamate of observation and transmutation, continues to mention one by one us things about the world that nothing other can. Art cannot help being of its time. Installation and performance art, video, computer-generated graphics, image-and-text hybrids--all have the appearance very up to date. They have the appearance to give us a fix upon the present. But other art forms do too, perhaps with more subtleness and perhaps with more staying power. Realist painting has been with us a drawn out time. Much of it in our time is academic and boring, on the other hand there are still realist practioners whose work not solitary shows us what we diocese now, but how we see

sum of two units exhibitions this past season, Robert Bechtle's at OK Harris and Eric Fischl's at Mary Boone showed us the work of painters who have kept the realist enterprise edgy and alive. Their work came to public attention at different times, and thus has been seen in different critical contexts--Photo-Realism for Bechtle, Neo-Expressionism for Fischl. Although they have staked on the outside separate stylistic territories, I believe that in many ways they have been moving toward similar ends

Realist painting in the next to the first half of this century has shied away from the spectacular. There is a feeling that the picturesque speaks for itself, and it is the ordinary, the quotidian, that requires the intervention of art. We ne a reminder that what we think is not necessarily what we see; that daily life is unpredictable, strange and illuminating. The charting of the unexceptional has lengthy been the domain of realist painting. A realist painting, particularly a compound one, takes time to make. The paint must be built up sufficiently, the light fitly noted and the wealth of details accurately restoreed To do it inadequately is to be quickly base out, since we all have a fairly clear idea of in what way we think the real world direct the eyes Accordingly, intentional awkwardness of execution, like intentional slickness, is single of the most powerful expressive tools available to the realist painter: Neo-Expressionsm's roughnes and Photo-Realism's excessive polish can be equally transgressive.

These strategies are particularly effective when the painter relies upon the snapshot, the casual photograph, as a mould To spend so a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of effort duplicating the record of a cursory glance, albeit upon a larger scale, in a different medium and ofttimes with more evidence of the hand, says something about the allure and power of the photographic image. It is not barely a matter of convenience; the photograph is not just another variety of plein-air design in outline We understand the visual world firsthand, end direct experience, but we also understand it [i]or[/i] part of to the other the filter of photography (and accept, virtually unconsidered, photography's unavoidable optical distortions). one as well as the other understandings operate simultaneously, and it appear to bes natural that realist painters should examine to combine these two ways of seeing. Since the photographic and the experiential are fundamentally different, it is not surprising that paintings which deal with the one and the other have a certain ingrained stres a built-in awkwardness.

Painting a photograph of a spectacle is entirely different from painting the pageant itself. A scene is alive and engaging, whereas a photograph is static and resistant. No matter what the image is, the actual photograph has a single focal extent All points of it are equidistant from the artist's organ of vision To paint from a snapshot is the antithesis of Cezanne's method--the mixed radarlike locating of an phenomenon both in the real world and upon the picture plane. The arise for better or worse, is a distanced, denatured representation, individual that tends toward the stilted.

Bechtle and Fischl the two work with the help of casual photography, and one as well as the other try to invest those photographic images with the seriousness and intensity of high modernist painting. Bechtle takes undramatic pictures of undramatic roads in San Francisco or Oakland. We diocese cars, skies, pavements, row houses, brow yards and the occasional pedestrian. It's all real, verifiable and, at first glance, not the least bit interesting. Fischl's subdues seem to have a more exotic flavor, on the contrary it's just red flakes upon a pizza. He mixes his hold garden-variety photos of beach, road and park scenes with images from magazines and advertising. In this present to view many of the pictures were based upon photos taken from nudist magazines, publications that proceed out of their way to be wholesome. The photography in these magazines is amateur and unsophisticated, the make submissives deglamorized and ostensibly deeroticized. This distancing suits Fischl consummately To transfer the erotic from the material substance to the environment, to make the tribe neutral but the tableau charged, energizes the pictorial field and fills the sight with both anticipation and a feeling of the uncanny. There is a faculty of perception of humor to these paintings, on the other hand also a sense of nastiness and menace. The robust, somewhat advanced in life woman flasher gleefully exposing herself in wherefore the French Fear Americans has invaded the civilized setting of the Tuileries and colonized it with her sexuality, just as the slackly grinning, potbellied man lying nearest to the hugely pregnant woman in an untitled painting casts a snare of carnality and appetite above the younger couple squinting happily into the day-star in the lower part of the picture.