An artist looks into the past

Exhibition on the work of the contemporary painter Philip Taaffe now at the Portalakis collection venue

ALEXANDRA KOROXENIDIS

American contemporary artists have one great non-European legacy to draw upon. It is the legacy of the so-called New York school, the postwar artistic movement formulated by painters including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. One of the strongest eras in the history of American modernism, the art of that period carries an influence that is still evident in much of today’s American art. References rooted in that tradition fill the work of the contemporary artist Philip Taaffe. The quest for art that contains spirituality and draws its inspiration from archaic or non-Western art as well as the powers of nature are all aspects that Taaffe has derived from the New York school and mixed with contemporary elements to formulate a very personal style.

The connection comes through in “Philip Taaffe’s Sympathetic Magic,” an exhibition on the artist’s work organized by the Zacharias Portalakis collection (all works exhibited belong to this private collection). This is the largest, most comprehensive exhibition on the artist’s work ever held in Greece. It includes works from 1996 to the present, Taaffe’s impressive, large, abstract compositions, as well as his smaller and technically excellent oils on paper. David Rimanelli, professor of art history at New York University, is the writer of the essay in the supplementary catalog. In his analysis, Rimanelli places Taaffe in the “appropriation art” that emerged in New York during the late 1980s. A contemporary of Peter Halley, with whom he shared similar concerns, and of the same generation as the slightly older Ross Bleckner, Taaffe simulated the work of well-known abstract painters, mainly the American abstract expressionists.

Taaffe, who was born in New Jersey in 1955 and was trained at Cooper Union, has repeatedly stressed the effect that the work of the New York school had on his work; in the mid-1980s he made a series of paintings (the technique of collage is an important aspect in those works) that reproduced specific works by Barnett Newman. In his essay, Rimanelli quotes Taaffe: “At that time in the mid-1980s when I wanted to reflect upon these paintings that I felt close to, I decided that rather than making some influenced variant of these works, in the school of so-and-so, I would make my own representative version of a specific abstract work. In an effort to find my way, I wanted to see if I could produce a convincing version of a previous abstract painting by making it on the same scale and in the same way, not slavishly, but lovingly, as a tribal recapitulation, or as a form of liturgical re-enactment.”

At the heart of postmodernism, appropriation was a prevalent tendency at the time. Some artists employed it to show the blurred boundaries between high art and contemporary culture. For Taaffe, it was a way to reproduce the sense of the sublime that these original paintings strove for. His objective was also to bring together in a single composition different references taken from art history and the history of world civilization: references that range from Asian and Islamic art to ancient Greek and Roman civilization. Like the New York school artists, Taaffe employed motifs taken from distant and ancient cultures. Although none of the works shown in the Portalakis collection exhibition belong to this early period, they all continue the same principle of appropriating and mixing styles. Motifs taken from ancient Mediterranean cultures become prevalent in the “Naples period” of his work, the period between 1988-1991 which Taaffe spent in the south of Italy. “I do not believe that one must entirely accept the culture that one is in. If you are an artist, part of your job is to change that culture, to create alternative cultural possibilities,” Taaffe has said. “Vasorum” from 2006 is inspired by that period. Rimanelli notes that the motifs are taken from the pulpits and baptisteries of Tuscan Romanesque churches and the colors are inspired by the Mediterranean light. The painting also manifests the artist’s taste for arranging his compositions in symmetrical, grid-like formations, probably a reference to the modernist grid. There is also that sense of a frontal composition and the use of shape and color to create a play between the foreground and background of the composition. “Yellow Painting with Diatoms” (1997-98) or “Ophiuran Valley” (2003) – two other large-scale works in the Portalakis collection exhibition – combine all of the above elements. The marine creatures (starfish, mussels, diatoms etc) and primitive organisms that are featured in those works also indicate Taaffe’s interest in natural history, an interest that again harks back to the universal quests of the New York school paintings.

The illustrations by the late 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel were an inspiration for many of those nature-related works, including the beautifully made oils on paper. In these works, one motif appears through the other. There is that translucent, ethereal effect of physical presence evaporating into shadows, an effect that alternates between density and lightness. Rimanelli refers to them as “cloud paper drawings with oil pigment on paper” and notes the resourceful technique that Taaffe has used. These drawings are not as abstract as the compositions in the large paintings. Less bold but equally engaging, they express another side to the work of this imaginative contemporary artist who delves into art history and the mystery of the past to create a world of fantasy.

“Philip Taaffe’s Sympathetic Magic,” at the Portalakis collection exhibition space (8 Pesmazoglou, 210.331.8933, www.portalakiscollection.gr) through February 20. Wednesdays 6-8 p.m., Saturdays 11 a.m. - 3 p.m.