On November 5th an exhibition of ten monumental watercolors by Joseph Raffael opens at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, continuing through January 2nd. This show has traveled to three museum venues: Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, Denver; Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado and The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio and will continue in January at the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with essays by Virginia Bonito, Marianne Lorenz and Dr. Louis A. Zona, as well as personal observations and journal entries by the artist.
Since Raffael’s exhibition two years ago, an evolution has taken place in his work. For the first time in many years the new works focus on a theme, the flower. Not since the “Water Paintings” of the ‘70s, and the “Lannis in Sieste” paintings of the late ‘80s has the artist devoted himself to a single concept for an exhibition. Something has broken open in the new work, a quality that comes with arriving at a certain age, decades devoted to the practice of painting, and a state of mind that only maturity brings. Nature remains the artist’s subject and profound partner in the flower images, which he approaches with new eyes and a new hand. At times, Raffael gathers seasonal flowers from the garden and brings them into the studio. Placed in vases, the cut flowers are part of the collage of the artist’s life and visual surroundings, which include images that honor artists through art history, from Egyptian carvings to Van Gogh self-portraits to Bonnard interiors.
While Raffael’s earlier watercolors focused on the riches of the world around his home and garden—the carp pond in his back yard, the flowers in his garden, the birds in his aviaries—the new work invites the viewer to new depths and focuses on myriad iterations; each blossom a vista into the cycles of the seasons and the cycles of life. The artist’s passion for the subject is palpable, as he breathes light, air, and perfume into his magnifications of nature’s image and scale. In watercolor, Raffael strives to penetrate the source-essence of nature, to get inside the core of a rose and be dazzled by its warmth, embrace and glow, to gaze at azaleas in refulgent bloom parading across the paper unfurling their petals in full sun. Virginia Bonito writes:
“The sagacious belief that the macrocosm (the Universe) is reflected in the microcosm (our earth) is central to philosophic thought from the earliest moments of recorded history. The theme is central to Joseph’s own thought and informs his entire oeuvre.”
Like the watercolors of the past ten years, Raffael surrounds his flower images with colorful borders, an inner frame, a declaration of the sublimity of the “act of painting” echoing facets of the central field. Within the narrow border are jewel-like abstract dashes and drips of color, traces of the history of colors used in the petals themselves. Virginia Bonito writes of the border in “Blossoming”:
”The painted border, a trademark of Joseph’s oeuvre that sometimes acts as a framing device for the central subject here is given the special role of expanding the tender image, repeating in dancing, marquee fashion, the colors of the branch, garden and season, all vibrating in concert with Nature.”
For Raffael it is not the subject that speaks most powerfully, but the paint itself, the application of the paint, the puddling, the translucence, the startling vibrations of orange next to red next to pink next to fuchsia. As his palette enters new territories, with surprising juxtapositions, he offers the viewer a bouquet of watercolors in celebration of his 75th year. The artist writes:
“What I see is only the painting, it comes before the flowers, and remains after the flowers. In fact, that’s all I see when I look, I see the painting as painting. The flower is the road map; if we follow its course, we see the unimaginable. The painting is a vehicle taking me to unknown color-and-form destinations not previously on any map I have ever seen”
The flower provides the artist with an opportunity to express the range of power, emotion, beauty, poignancies contained within nature’s offerings. Dr. Louis A. Zona writes:
“Since the birth of modernism a century and a half ago, perhaps only Joseph Raffael has approached the floral theme with as much passion, sensitivity or intelligence as Redon. The flower is, for Raffael ”…the expression of life’s natural cycle potential, returning over and over—they unfold, they blossom, adding such beauty to our world, to our existence.” Raffael’s devotion to the flower as subject reveals as well a profound interest in the unanswerable mysteries of nature, or what Leonardo termed the “unseen forces.”
