OBSERVANT

OBSERVANT

by Vicki Sher

Artists: Cynthia Lin, Paolo Arao, Jenny Dubnau, Chris Doyle, Molly Springfield, Mike Bayne and others.

 

“The attempt to create beauty as perfectly as possible has led these artists to emphasize craft -- not at the expense of vision, but as its instrument.….superior craft intensifies sight so that it becomes insight,…”                       

                                                            Donald Kuspit,1999, describing the New Old Masterism

 

Donald Kuspit was referring to artists such as Odd Nerdrum, Julie Heffernan, and Eric Fischl, who aim for mastery in their paint and a forward path for representational work. The artists participating in OBSERVANT turn masterful technique toward a new source material: the digitalized image.  They all possess brilliant technical skills and a steadfast belief that reproducing the seen world faithfully will provide insights into that world. They also demonstrate that looking, when done with devotion, done methodically, or even with religious seriousness, approaches something the opposite of religion. Here, seeing is believing. The artists are "observant" and "extremist" in their painstaking depictions but, despite the religious fervor that those words bring to mind, they offer a decidedly undogmatic course: devotion to visual fact, specifically, digitalized visual fact.

 

These artists aim for exactitude, in a struggle to find a language with which to describe and explain, in all its complicated particularity, the world around them.  They take on their subjects with scientific eyes.  In all these cases, a technological support underlies the work but, paradoxically, the support is subverted in the end.  The computer, the scanner or digital camera speed our fluency with pictures, but these artists take opportunities to slow things down and re-assert the human pace and human comfort with slower absorption.  In doing so they posit that without full absorption, there is no meaning, or a diminished return from “just looking.” Translating a photo to drawing, Xerox to paint, etc., re-invigorates the image and at the same time demands of the viewer an act of concentration whose reward is a startling intimacy.

 

It is, moreover, a recurring act of faith for an artist to sit down and reproduce a photograph.  The power of an attentive hand is ages old, but has a peculiar contemporariness.  These images not only represent our world as it looks today, but also reflect our current technological tools for image-gathering and our specific ways of combining old and new.  How we see has changed as much as what we see, so even the basic art tools (pencil, oil paint) have new jobs to do to reestablish their validity.