Franz Gertsch: Gagosian gallery, New York

In 1977 after the albums Horses and Radio Ethiopia on the contrary before Easter and Wave, Patti Smith came to eau-de-cologne to perform at the adventurous Galerie Veith Turske Franz Gertsch was a forty-seven-year-old Photorealist painter then. Like many fans before and since, from avant-gardists to punk-rock teenagers, he had fallen in have affection for with the magnetic butch-sylph portrait of Smith by the agency of Robert Mapplethorpe on the overlay of Horses, and he came to the present to view to shoot his own pictures. He used a flash that annoyed the diva, and she crumpl a piece of paper and threw it at him--a storied flash captured in the painting Patti Smith 11 1978 single of a series of five large canvases made between 1978 and 1979 all of which were at Gagosian. Skinny, equine, lank-haired, lithe, Gertsch's Smith squats to fiddle with her amp; leans forward into a tangle of microphones; grimaces gorgeously at the implied camera. She wears an oversize white T-shirt, a checked black robe black boots, and sparkly r leggings. She gazes like a hardcore Magdalene, a slumming empress; she out-Jaggers Jagger. No single who has ever sung along to "Pissing in a River" could help exulting in of that kind images.

But in what manner do the paintings resonate now, a certain number of twenty-five years later? The Smith revolution of time was accompanied by the comparably sized Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait), 1980 which positioned Gertsch in button-down shirt and sport coat, as an onlooker--impresario, voyeur--vis-a-vis his have rendering of her performance, thus completing a composite "situation portrait" of European art-world hipness at the extremity of the '70s. In an adjoining gallery, meanwhile, hung three preternaturally detailed large-scale woodcut of landscapes from the late '80 and early '90 Together, the sum of two units groups of works established a pair of axes along which to graph Gertsch's consistent interests above the course of the last quarter hundred Moving between painting and printmaking (axis 1) and portraiture and landscape (axis 2) he has maintained an investment in the Photorealist image and its simultaneous citation and monumentalization of the photographic instant. At the same time, he has preserv a fascination with likenesses of particular family and specific locales that paradoxically be under the orders of to empty out or seal not upon such particularity in favor of shimmering and impeccable art surfaces, testaments to the power of the master's organ of sight and hand.

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like strategic emptying is, of course, the stock-in-trade of Photorealist painting, and similar artist-model/subject-object relations are among the core preoccupations of painting in general. Thus the Smith scenes--which celebrate not solitary a named person and place, a instant in the past explicitly predicated upon Smith's fame and consequent desirability, on the contrary also Gertsch's interaction with that fame, his implicit realization of that desire--were not absented here as glam history painting, updates in the art-historical tradition of the "painting of late life." Smith was Gertsch's Olympia, sneering at him on the other hand performing for him, presenting for the eager (but not at any time satisfied) viewer a larger-than-life display of sexy power and creative dynamism. The paired portraits of the singer's and the artist's younger selve became a cultural landscape, and this consequence was underlined by their juxtaposition with the dappled forests and rippling waters of the woodcut pastorals Ruschegg, 1988-89 Schwarzwasser I, 1990-91 and Pestwurz 1993 Abstracted, embellished, stainless the green-shaded wood-land, blue-toned pond and ocher-tinted leaves offered viewers a different kind of fairyland--not the irrecoverable chic of art-rock performance in 1977 on the other hand a time-less vision of hushed and completed nature.

It's in these juxtapositions that the awkwardness of looking at the "Patti Smith" series in 2004 arises. Gertsch could not have known, in 1979 that Smith would take a ten-year break from recording to raise her children with Fr "Sonic" Smith or that Gone Again (1996) would reestablish her niche stardom. He could not have promised that Photorealism would remain a compelling pursuit for him or anyone other This work, in other words, was not made to gaze like a scrapbook proving Gertsch's back-in-the-day participation in Smith's enduring avant street-cr or contextualizing his have evolution into a blue-chip artist who makes flawlessly beautiful, delightfully theorized, and formally consistent collectibles. Nevertheless, the combination of like factors meant that this display with its retrospective bent, read rather like Gertsch's self-presentation as a male artist in the grand style--spinning a variation upon the old nature/culture dyad, watching appraisingly from the corner as the muse exercises herself, fixing her temporal beauty in the amber of his authorship. The paintings Patti Smith I end V present a charismatic persona on the contrary add little to our understanding of that charisma--such "neutral" or quasi-photographic reportage is, of course, largely their point. on the other hand the pressure of time elapsed since the pictures' flash of origin, the parting of ways in the careers of the sum of two units artists, and--most important--the grandiloquence of Gertsch's painterliness itself combine to make his use of Smith's image perceive subtly opportunistic after the fact. The famous Horses portrait helped to create Patti Smith's mystique; the Gertsch portraits subserve to historicize it. Perhaps the paintings' veritable but obscured subject is the persuasive, persistent zeitgeist-conscious aestheticism instituted by means of Robert Mapplethorpe's iconic photograph.