A Slice of the River

By ROBERT HUGHES

An artist's sudden maturation is balm to see: 20 years of work, elusive recognition--then a burst of paintings of exceptional originality and depth. It does not often happen that way, but in the past year it has to a soft-spoken California painter named Joseph Raffael, 40. His series of five Water Paintings--large studies of light and reflection on fragments of river, without horizon or air or any of the normal appurtenances of landscape painting--goes on view this week at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in lower Manhattan.

Raffael was born in Brooklyn. He studied and lived in New York City before deciding, as he put it, that "I desperately needed to find some alternative" to the abrasive, narrow competitiveness of its art scene. During a 1966 teaching stint at the University of California in Berkeley, he met Artists William Allan and William Wiley, still his closest friends. "I liked the independence and quality of their work," he recalls, "and especially how their lives as men and artists were so rich. It instilled in me a sense of what a person and an artist could be." With his wife Judy and their four children he moved to San Francisco in 1969, buying a studio in the redwoods of Marin County.

Raffael had long painted isolated images based on photos clipped from magazines. Blown up to large scale, the objects were rich in color and thinly painted, "realistic" and yet imbued with a mescaline intensity. He found that California did not so much alter his style as allow him to work less self-consciously within it. For Water Paintings, begun in 1972, he used photos of trout, river surfaces and rapids in northern California snapped by Allan, an enthusiastic fly fisherman.

Deadpan Images. Raffael's use of photos has created, in some quarters, the impression of an affinity with the much touted American "New Realism." Not so. The neorealist effort--air-brushed Volkswagen bumper bars, Los Angeles parking lots, horse postcards, the whole post-Pop iconography of deadpan images--is merely an absent-minded rumination on fact, painting reduced to bland, mechanical transliteration. The method precludes light and atmosphere, and silences all dialogue between brush-work and image. New Realism is the limp, ineloquent salon art of the '70s.

In contrast, Raffael is obsessed by light, its sparkle and sheen and transparency. The subjects of his earlier paintings seem to have been chosen to show what happens to light on every sort of surface--the hammered gold of a chalice, the sleek moist interior of an oyster or the pock-marked ivory of a hornbill's beak. Raffael undertook an inspection of their varied skins on the level, if not of the cell, at least on that of the pore. Each point where light hit the tiniest break of texture or color was set down in a curious, tightly circling calligraphy that resembled beads, or agglomerations of frog spawn. Despite their iconic serenity when seen from a distance, Raffael's paintings disclose a bejeweled profusion of incident close up. "There's just no end to reality," says Raffael. "You can keep going closer into it, but you never ever come out the other end."

Where, then, should a painter stop? Jan van Eyck took his scrutiny down to the limit of detail where the smallest legible form seems governed by a single hair of the brush: a painter's metaphor of the universal eye of God, marking the sparrow's fall. Perhaps that option is not open to a modern artist since the assumptions behind it no longer exist. In any case, Raffael (who, like any other young artist in New York in the '50s, was affected by Abstract Expressionism) wanted to keep handwriting--the visible gesture of the brush, done in and for itself--in his work. A large part of his enterprise over the past several years has been both to preserve the spontaneous mark and to generate the maximum illusion.

The Water Paintings are the freest images Raffael has so far made, and by far the most poetic. The blots, scribbles and stains of the paint--closely worked and yet oddly abstract, as if performed in a trance--are analogues to the liquidity of water itself. Paint "equals" water in much the same way as, in some Renaissance portraiture, the graininess of pigment "equals" the cellular structure of flesh.

The photographs Raffael used had an obvious function: they froze time. Pictures of this size (some 6 ft. by 9 ft.) cannot readily be made by setting up an easel beside some river in northern California; only Monet, with his unequaled powers of observing and retaining a fleeting effect of light and movement, could paint his water-lily murals in open air at Giverny with gardeners struggling to haul the vast 19-ft. canvases in and out of his studio. But Raffael's images are not ruled by their starting point in the photo. They are recreation, not enlargement; between photo and painting fall a multitude of pictorial decisions made with a tender virtuosity without parallel in other American figurative painting today.

As one observes this water bubbling over falls and ledges, moving icily above its brown pebbles or taking the sky like a slightly ominous and broken sheet of mercury, the illusionistic skill is impressive. But the real life of these paintings comes from Raffael's ability to take a slice of river and, by giving it absolute presence, turn it into the stuff of contemplation. The Water Paintings are lyrical considerations of time and mutability, as well as matter. "You cannot," Heraclitus remarked, "step into the same river twice"--an observation that a later Greek sophist neatly amended: "You cannot step into the same river once." It is a text for the silences of Raffael's work.

--Robert Hughes

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