Rendering 1: 'A deep look at Fischl's painting process'

The article ‘A deep look at Fischl’s painting process’ was published by Kenneth Baker in San Francisco Chronicle on January 30, 2013. It reports about Fischl’s art and his painting process.

   Speaking of his paintings, it’s necessary to note that "The Pictures Generation" at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is the show that was organized by the Met's photography department, which might have considered Fischl too much a painter. It’s important to note that at the same time it is an anxiety over the collapse of conventions and institutions, the blurring of gender and other pegs of identity and opportunism supplanting idealism, all roiled by tidal waves of mediated images.

   Analyzing the situation, it’s necessary to emphasize that the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia originated the Fischl show, where superficial affinities between Fischl's art and Bay Area Figurative painting may explain its presentation.  And giving appraisal of the situation, it’s necessary to point out the fact that Fischl always put painting foremost, and he rose to prominence among such painters like Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. However, he had gone to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (a school known as a hotbed of socially critical conceptual art), where his work was frequently linked with that of David Salle, who also traced his paintings to photographic sources.

   However, there is every reason to believe that "Dive Deep" will surprise some visitors, as it includes so many of the photographs Fischl has taken to germinate drawings, paintings and prints. Besides, it’s very likely that the selection of works usefully traces the passage of a female beach bather at St. Tropez from photographs through various studies into graphics and painting. Speaking of ‘Dive Deep’, it’s interesting to note that not only paintings, but also the small bronze sculptures also will surprise viewers, as Fischl's art is the tension in it between the fabrication of an image and its use to fabricate intrigue. So the he exhibition tells people almost more than they care to know about Fischl's working process, because sometimes it involves so many stages that the climactic work seems an awfully small payoff. But the 6-by-9-foot painting of novelist Richard Price and family, ‘Untitled’, shows Fischl's hand at its most relaxed; he evokes daylight, demeanor and an uneasy family dynamic with striking economy and credibility.

   There’s still one question: why to paint these images when the camera and computer already accomplish so much. And here necessary to note that the answer is simple, as passing these frozen and sometimes scrambled figments through Fischl’s own hand and nervous system will extract from them a human truth otherwise unavailable or felt only in authentically.

   In conclusion the author suggests that the most ambitious projects represented in the show is "The Bed, The Chair, The Sitter," that involves Fischl hiring models to improvise scenes and poses in a chosen environment to generate a sort of storyboard without fixed narrative. After all there’s another question:  why Fischl requires such elaborate stagecraft to let his hand go.

   Everything I can say is that art is the expression of the world’s vision of the artist, the image of his spiritual world on canvas, so for the average man, delved not so deeply into the world of art, it is difficult to understand the meaning of this or that work. You need to be a connoisseur of art to appreciate the artist’s work.