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Wolfgang Gäfgen: Portfolios
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
These are images dark and enduring, lingering long on the screens of the mind. The alluring mezzotints in Wolfgang Gäfgen: Portfolios invoke the transformation of simple objects into images of wonder. Gäfgen's prints display a world of form and texture unutterably rich with sensation, one in which a cloth laid over two beams, or a long bit of stick wrapped about with a rope or rag, become voluptuous with impossible detail. Objects whose qualities would ordinarily seem mundane and apparent are revealed in these deeply textured images to have enchantments beyond the pale of the everyday. Twenty-five large-scale mezzotints are on exhibit, presenting four complete 'portfolios', or sets of prints created by an artists as explorations on a theme. The first, Sept Manières Noires (Seven Mezzotints) (1972) is comprised of seven prints which explore themes of constraint and binding, enhanced by elusive subtleties of texture. Images of articles of clothing and the unlikely inclusion of a leather-clad dental chair traverse a gamut of surface tensions and sleek textile finishes. A garment of black satin and black silk, bound in chains; a black leather jacket, supple on a stand; and a suit-jacket, bound tightly in the straps of an overfull suitcase are three of these excursions into the artist's perceptive rendering of the subtle differences in suppleness and reflectivity that distinguish, for example, silk from leather when both are equally black. The differences are delicate and precise, particularly in Untitled (from "Sept Manières Noires") (one-color mezzotint and etching, inked à la poupée: approx. 30 x 22 in.: 1972), where the garment is made of both satin and silk, differentiated primarily by minute qualities of 'hand' and sheen. Binding amplifies wrinkles and folds in the garment, a further opportunity for the artist to show his virtuosity, and enhances the light suppleness of the fabrics with an element of taut straining in the tight leather straps of a suitcase or the solid articulation and weightiness of links of chain. Individual images in Sept Manières Noires are worked over with a variety of additional printing techniques, including engraving, aquatint, and roulette. Several are touched with color, which enlivens without distracting. Spartan backgrounds of plain paper provide a cleansing balance that at the same time maintains focus on the lush imagery. Mezzotint, the medium of these images, is an intaglio printmaking technique, intaglio deriving from the Italian for 'engraving', meaning the image to be printed is worked in below the surface of the metal printing plate, and holds the ink that will create the print. Engraving and etching are the more common incarnations of intaglio technique, both involving the use of a sharp-pointed tool to scratch the design into the plate. Though both engraving and etching differ in method, in general the sharpness of the tool restricts the artist to working completely with line. Shading or modeling must be accomplished with small lines close together (hatching) to darken the area and give the illusion of shadow. Mezzotint in contrast offers unlimited richness of tonality, allowing the artist to create shadows, shades, grays, depthful blacks. The tool of the mezzotint differs from the sharp-pointed burin of etching. Known as a 'rocker', it is a flat, finely serrated metal tool of tempered steel with grooved lines. The rocker is worked across the printing plate, texturing the surface to the desired degree; upon this surface the artist may burnish smooth the areas that create the grays or lights of the image. The technique permits of effects of marvelous subtlety, and as here, a deep, almost mystical expanse of black background that is not simply black, but a printed surface that bears the richness of all-but-imperceptible texturing left by the touch of the rocker. Prints from the portfolio Hata (1980) have an almost anthropological quality to them, a study of objects of mysterious potency and portent. Each of the seven prints studies combinations of long vertical branches, wrapped or, again, bound, with flat flags of cloth or coils of rope. Gäfgen's rope in particular fascinates: some of it rough, fibrous and complex in its hairiness, other selections smoother and more organized in their hempen weave. Emerging from darkness, or standing in dark relief against the light background of unprinted paper, the coil-wrapped branches show the artist experimenting not only with characteristic themes of binding and closely-wrought texture, but as well with effects created by proximity, number, and the choice of light, dark, or gradated background. The long vertical branch with its wrap or tangle of knot appears in multiples, from one to four at a time, at times deeply shifted to the left or right of the picture space to emphasize its solitary elegance. In the untitled second print from Hata (mezzotint: approx. 30 x 22 in.: 1980) the narrative between cloth-wrapped branch and rope-wrapped branch is enhanced by the use of two differing methods of mezzotint handling: subtractive on the left, where the black ground lies deep and rich behind the 'negative' of the cloth-wrapped rope; additive on the right, where the plain unprinted paper forms the background and the mezzotint technique delineates, with exquisite precision, a counterpart in positive darks. As in all these works, the innumerable points of contrast between light and dark, stick and rope, coil and rag, flat texture and smooth are arresting, complex and pleasing. Two further portfolios are included, the six-print Six Manières Noires (Six Mezzotints) (1976), and the five prints of Angles (1981). All show the artist taking his characteristic studies in different yet satisfying directions. In Six Manières Noires (Six Mezzotints), hard, square objects are played off against supple wrapping, cloth or apparent plastic, which either enfolds, covers, or serves as a joining element. A stubby cross of two short, thick sections of wood reappears, in one print wrapped with cloth, in another, bound with rope, anticipating some of the explorations of Hata, above. Angles explores light and shadow and the revelatory ways in which they express the contours, volumes, and qualities of the object beneath the cloth. In the prints of Angles a wrinkled square of cloth appears laid over two joined pieces, presumably wood. As in Untitled (from "Angles") (mezzotint: 30 x 22-1/2 in.: 1981), that which is beneath can only be inferred, for its representation is solely in those qualities transmitted by the crispness of the raking light across the cloth, which completely overlays it. We feel that we see and appreciate everything in our visually busy culture. But to a great degree, common sense, rationality, and practicality make things seem plain and obvious, and therefore, unremarkable, overlooking the mystery to be encountered in this type of intense observation. We are, in fact, heirs to a huge estate of sensation. And for long moments we may linger before Gäfgen's imagery, suffused with a reawakening of that perception. Gäfgen, a German artist (b. Hamburg 1936), is numbered among the contemporary masters of the mezzotint. The depth and evocative qualities of these prints give ample evidence why. Twenty-five vivid, highly skilled prints from four portfolios are on exhibit; select examples of the artist's work in graphite and lithograph bring the total to twenty-nine. Wolfgang Gäfgen: Portfolios is on exhibit through March 18, 2007. --Katherine R. Lieber Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net. |
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