REPORT FROM NEW YORK
by Donald Kuspit

Nature Never Left: Joseph Raffael’s Watercolors

Joseph Raffael, Interior: R.S. & F.D.D., watercolor on paper, 60 3/4 x 44 1/2”, 2005.

 Serious artists are once again making seriously human figures, in recognition of the fact that dehumanizing modernism is on its last legs, as the members of a recent panel at the Daheesh Museum unanimously agreed. An even more important sign is the resurrection of nature imagery--not only landscape imagery but, more intimately, garden imagery, which is what we see in Joseph Raffael’s new watercolors.

  José Ortega y Gasset famously described the process of “dehumanization” at work in modern art and its even more disturbing “denaturalization” of the environment. Marshall McLuhan goes one analytic step further, observing that modern life-negating processes involve “the stripping of the senses and their interruption in tactile synthesia.” If, as McLuhan writes, “the garden indicates the interplay of all the senses in haptic harmony,” and if “the garden died” when “God took the spinning jenny out of his side,” as W.B. Yeats cryptically wrote (quoted by McLuhan), then Raffael’s watercolors and his oeuvre as a whole signify the rebirth of the garden.

  In retrospect, Monet’s elusive representations of his garden at Giverny show its death throes, suggesting a tenuous hold on nature rather than its confident possession. We see traces of nature rather than its full-blown presence, an esthetic clinging to organic life as it fades into emotional insignificance. Monet’s is a lame duck garden compared to Raffael’s sensuously exciting garden, full of vigorously blossoming flowers, each a confident prima donna surrounded by a supporting cast of sturdy green plants. Raffael has restored the garden to its rightful place as a hortus conclusus of contemplative consciousness.

  Entering it we are surrounded by a preternatural innocence charged with instinct. Raffael’s garden is a prelapsarian paradise, but it is also luridly alive. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in Pond for F. Garcia Lorca (2005). Ostensibly an homage to Lorca’s poem “The Garden,” which Raffael says evokes "the garden of our own inner creative domains," it is also the realm of "duende" that Lorca described in a famous essay. Without duende—the interplay of vitalizing instincts—the garden dies, becoming sensuously uneventful and emotionally hollow.

Raffael’s hortus conclusus is not only a sanctuary from the times and society, and as such timeless and transcendental, but a space of critical consciousness, for it alters our consciousness of the world and suggests a different way of living in it.

  Raffael acknowledges this when he cites Lorca: “From the earth-loosed blood moans the silent folksong of the snake.” “This Lorca quote is quite perfect,” he writes in his journal, and it is the kind of elemental perfection he wants in his paintings—the subtle artistic perfection that “happens when [the] irresistible urge to make meaning collides with the unmovable mystery of the world.” More particularly of nature, “the source” in which “the mystery and silence” of being resides, whatever meaning human beings impose on it.

Joseph Raffael, Homage to Carolyn Brady – 1939–2005, watercolor on paper, 41 1/2 x 44 1/2”, 2005.

  Pond for F. Garcia Lorca is at once impressionist and expressionist, abstract and descriptive—an uncanny mix of modernist modes, made all the more exotic by a traditional concern for intelligibility, instant readability, and idealization. The point is made brilliantly clear by Return of Spring (2005), an allover work in which each gesture is simultaneously a detail in what is in effect a close-up of a gloriously blossoming plant.

   A patchwork of luminous reds supported by darker greens—Raffael typically uses these complementaries (but he doesn’t mix them, so they don’t neutralize each other, which is why the have a startling effect)—Raffael’s watercolor is at once an abstract tour de force and an objective “report” about natural change.

  The esthetic simultaneity of opposites is modernist, but the truth to nature idealism is traditionalist. Also modernist is the emphasis on a sensational moment; also traditionalist is the contemplative brooding that immortalizes the moment. The painted frames of Raffael’s pictures, reminiscent of those by Seurat, are modernist, while their stable imagery is traditionalist, however inwardly animated his scenes. The works are a marvelous synthesis of the traditional desire to preserve and remember with the modern desire to articulate fleeting, inarticulate experience.

  What I most admire about Raffael’s works is their celebratory attitude toward life,their repudiation of modernist negativity and cynicism, their aura of happiness and optimism, and their effort to integrate art and life. We are in Raffael’s garden in Antibes, where he lives, and it is an artistic garden of life, suggesting that there is an art to life, all the more so if one wants to mirror it in an art that feels alive and personal. Roses for Vera (2004) and Homage to Carolyn Brady (1937–2005) are very personal: The voluptuous flowers pictured are symbols of the women named in the titles—the flowers are surrogate, epitomizing portraits—and embodiments of femininity. Perhaps even more tellingly, the flower vases in Mysteries and Change of the Season (both 2005) are decorated with flower designs, underscoring the inseparability of nature and art. One recalls similar still lifes and settings by Pierre Bonnard, but the manmade objects and people pictured are emotionally at odds with the lush nature around them. They seem to be apathetically passing their time, not in lively tune with nature.

Joseph Raffael, Fish Dream II, watercolor on paper, 44 1/2 x 64”, 2004.

  Raffael is totally attuned to nature. A true romantic, he finds profound meaning in its least of movements—and his surfaces are always moving, sometimes swiftly, more often with seemingly deliberate slowness. It is a kind of teleological view of nature: It has a secret purpose, which mysteriously has ties to human purpose and emotion. Certainly Raffael is reminding us that we are all natural Creatures in the swim of nature, whether we know it or not, like the golden fish in Life Streams (2004). Life is sacred for Raffael, as Inman’s Sacred Pond (2004) makes clear—a view we seem to have forgotten in these profane, deadly times.

 

Joseph Raffael – www.josephraffael.com
Nancy Hoffman Gallery – www.nancyhoffmangallery.com

Donald Kuspit is a professor of Art History and Philosophy at SUNY Stonybrook, and the A.D. White professor-at-large at Cornell University.