Paint Made Flesh

An exhibition at Phillips Collection: it's not about human flesh used as raw material by some quirky artists of today, or some crazy form of performance art. No, it is about the effort to show the human flesh in all its frailty and thus to make the image in likeness with what it is essential in human nature: desire and failure, illusion and despair.


Art was always marked by the tension between image and reality, and long time it was considered that the solution was to follow strictly the canons of beauty. Well, Rembrandt discovered that people are not always young and gorgeous, and Goya found out that behind grandeur there was silly ridicule. And then, little by little, artists took the courage to depart from canons. They discovered that perspective was just a convention and that colors did not match always one another. And they went further, giving up completely the representation of reality and looking for their own universes of lines and circles.

Only it happened that these lines and circles started to claim their own stories, their own plots, and thus became again images; and the tension came back.

Pop Art tried to bring the real objects into the work art: only it happened that these real objects lost their quality of being real objects and became images. Photorealism tried to follow consciously the reality by examining carefully the objective image given by a photo, finding this way those elements in the reality that human eye does not perceive: only the reality carefully reconstructed by Photorealists was not ours; it was their own.

Hyperrealism took another way: to look for what are essentially our weaknesses and to speak honestly about them: ugliness, ridicule, suffering, and so on.

Now, coming back to the exhibition at Phillips, not all artists there belong to Hyperrealism, of course; some were active long time before this term was coined; some Germans belong rather to Neo-Expressionism; some artists (like Francis Bacon) are too much their own guys to be possibly framed.

There is a video (authored by PhillipsArtMuseum) that will give you an idea about the exhibition. Unfortunately its width does not fit with the size of the blog page.

It was not allowed to take pictures inside, of course, but I will show you in some future posts images that I found in the album of the exhibition:

• A.R. Penck: Skizze
• Daniel Richter: Duisen
• If Life Were Life There Would Be No Death
• Background as Battleground
• Francesco Clemente
• Julian Schnabel - Corine Near Armenia
• Alice Neel - Randall in Extremis
• The Self Portraits of Tony Bevan
• Playing Against Type: John Currin
• Picasso: The Artist and His Model, 1964
• Hyman Bloom - The Hull
• Hyperrealism and Neo-Expressionism As the Same Thing: Jack Levine
• Lucian Freud
• Francis Bacon
• Cecily Brown
• David Park, Struggling Between Figurative and Abstract
  

(Phillips Collection)
(Contemporary Art)