This early self portrait by William Orpen dates from about 1910, and shows the young artist as the fashionable portrait painter in London that he was. Alternatively titled, “Leading the Life in the West,” a telltale camera in hand could bring this mirror shot of early self-fashioning into the present day.
These stitched canvas of chandeliers really drew me into the space at Andrea Rosen, where Michael Raedecker’s latest show tour is up through October 5. (Was up!–guess I just caught it). At first, I thought they were heavily painted, but then I realized the objects were embroidered into the picture before being painted over in monochrome silvers, deep blues, greys, and beiges.
I saw silver chandeliers, and immediately thought ‘how neo-baroque,’ especially with thread bursting from the canvas. However, more of the canvases represent houses. In them, the rectilinear lines and depictions of facade parallel the flat geometry of the exposed areas of color around the stitched areas. The surface of these areas of color are variated and indistinct in a nice complement to the richly textured surface.
Pure color resonance from the Byzantine mosaics of the Fruska Gora monasteries of northern Serbia and Yves Klien’s monochromatic canvases at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
These frescoes at the Velika Remeta monastery are the newest I saw of the three monasteries I visited that day. They were all Serbian Orthodox churches that had moved to these lush rolling hills to escape the Ottoman invasions. The old churches were later surrounded, quite close up, by newer cloisters, where monks, nuns, or sometimes both together, always led by a male priest, cared for the church and community. In the first one the bright, bold frescoes were relatively new, but still in the flat Byzantine style and surrounding a valuable icon of the three-handed Virgin Mary. I saw copies of this icon in the next two monasteries as well, all after from the same original that is apparently very special and located in present-day Ukraine. The continuity of tradition was striking.
When I was in Stockholm a few weeks later, the blues and golds reminded me forcefully of the Orthodox church decoration I had seen, particularly this first one.