Andrew, I’d like to add a painting by Marcus Reichert to your
post about how life and nature and great paintings all share the property of
being simultaneously simple and complex.
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| Tree 22" x 22" 1994 Marcus Reichert Private Collection, France |
This painting by Reichert is like that: deceptively simple
and yet extremely complex. His image certainly reduces the tree to a basic
shape; one that pretty much anyone anywhere would recognize as a tree. Simple enough, but it’s also not so easy; as one
looks, one finds it’s also incredibly complex and multi-layered. A great
painting.
I’d like to add this painting to Grace
DeGennaro’s to make the point that this quality is not bound to one way of working, but crosses the entire range of painting styles. As you wrote, from Memling to Pollock.
S.A.
One more thought:
ReplyDeleteI find this simple/complex quality totally missing in the work of some contemporary artists whose work is never-the-less very highly touted as important and cutting edge. Consequently, their work feels one-dimensional to me, empty or sophomoric, or like glib one-liners at best. They may amuse or startle or be odd for a moment, but nothing exists beyond that. Perhaps that in itself is viewed as an existential statement about a vapid society, though that seems to me a poor defense.