ART CITIES:Paris-Alex Katz
Although Alex Katz belongs to the Pop generation of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, it was not until the 1970s that his paintings were exhibited internationally. Since the 1980s, Katz has been a protagonist of Cool Painting, and one of the most influential painters of our present day.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive
Alex Katz in his solo exhibition “Red Dancers” presents new paintings and works on paper, all pertaining to the medium of dance. Since 1960 Alex Katz has continually drawn inspiration from dance, influenced by his longstanding collaboration with modern dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor (1930-2018). While working on sets and costumes for Taylor’s performances, Katz developed an original body of work, using dancers as models to explore the immediacy of gesture and movement through the medium of painting. In this new series of dancers’ portraits, Katz magnifies movement through the radical cropping that characterises his unique style, focusing on isolated parts of the body shown in arrested motion. This original format, which crops single body parts frozen in movement, is inspired by the imagery of television and Hollywood cinema, a technique used by the artist to convey the most arresting effect. Katz was inspired by the imagery of television and Hollywood films. The repeated use of the color red endows these new paintings with a marked intensity, highlighting in contrast the luminosity and dynamism of the dancer’s figure, executed with swift brushstrokes across a monochromatic background. The use of a red background is reminiscent of one of Katz’s early paintings, the famous “The Red Smile” (1963, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), which is a portrait of Ada, his wife and muse. The alluring effect of this picture is underlined by the visual appeal of Ada’s red lipstick, isolated on a monochrome surface that pays homage to the abstract painter Barnett Newman. In this work, Katz recalls that he first tried painting the background grey, which he later replaced with an all-over magenta red, choosing this color for its greater formal potency in clearly outlining Ada’s profile. More than 50 years later, Katz has used a similar painterly effect in his new series, using the color red to produce a sense of movement, which the artist describes as the ‘immediate sensation you see before you focus.’ The scale of these works, coupled with the cropping of the image and its smooth painted surface, conveys a heightened experience of the dancer’s presence: ‘When you actually see a dance, the figure is an inch and a half high from where you are in the audience. And if the dancer is very good, the performance becomes life size. It is no longer an inch and a half, it becomes an immersive experience. It’s all in your mind what life size is. So the key thing is the motion. With the cropping, you can convey more of the feeling of a performance than in a picture of people who are one inch high. Exhibited in the first floor gallery, a selection of Katz’s works on paper reveals both the initial inspiration and the process by which the artist figures out how to translate a raw image into a final work. In general, Katz begins with a quickly executed pen or pencil drawing and sometimes an oil sketch that defines the motif. He then builds upon the initial idea with successively refined drawings and large-format cartoons that he affixes to a primed canvas and punctures with a tool (a Renaissance technique called pouncing, invented for frescoes) to map the basic outline of the motif on the surface. Swiftly made, the sketches exhibited here are marvellously evocative and stand as tokens of the artist’s exploration of perspective, scale and focus, as well as the issue of colour.
Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 20/6-18/7/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.ropac.net
