Into the Cosmos
AgustĂ Puig
Agustà Puig Into the Cosmos
FRANKLIN BOWLES GALLERIES San Francisco / New York facing page:
Red welcome mixed media on canvas 2017 62 x 47.5 in 160 x 122 cm
1
Agustí Puig Into the Cosmos Agustí Puig has left terra firma for the cosmos. Puig’s palette has long revolved around ochres, umbers, and terra-cottas, and while those earth tones have not abated, his recent works are electrified with a vibrant red. The paintings emit an astral glow, an interpretation underscored by the artist’s repeated titular references to the sun, or the occasional flower that thrives in its light. However, Puig’s work is a study in contrasts. The red that blazes celestial also evokes a corporeal and even violent sensuality, particularly when it pools and coagulates on the painted surface, conjuring associations with flesh and viscera. Puig has long made reference to myth in his rotating cast of characters, and true to form, in the recent work we find Venus and the Three Graces, as well as a nod to ancient Egypt. But specific identities are more often supplanted by archetypes, of which there are two main categories. First, there are bodies without faces. With only rapid circular brushwork to insinuate heads, they remain emotionally inscrutable, and yet they are resolutely human. In Different Figures Together, for example, Puig overlays the bodies with concentric circles, reminiscent of traditional figure drawing techniques to calculate bodily proportions. The modeled contrast between light and shadow conveys a sense of mass that makes them relatable as human bodies occupying space. The second category inverts the first: the “transparent figures,” as the artist sometimes refers to them in titles, are disembodied faces, rendered schematically and in profile. Often monumental relative to their surroundings, they float in space like all-seeing heads, or in some cases they perch precariously atop blunt bodily fragments. When they appear in groups, they are like a cabal of metaphysical beings—not gods per se, but emissaries from another dimension. Born in 1957 in Sabadell (near Barcelona), Puig came of age as an artist in the 1980s, a decade of multiple returns. Foremost was the resurgence of painting’s status as a progressive medium in both the United States and in Europe: as a corrective to the cool austerity of conceptual art and the ephemerality of performance, there was a palpable desire among artists and viewers alike to interact with sensuous objects. The mechanistic aesthetic of Photorealism gave way to a renewal of the expressive Different figures together gesture, which had fallen out of fashion since the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. But expressionism in the 1980s did not necessarily appear in tandem with abstraction, as figurative painting made a decisive comeback as well. Along with the return of the figure came content, narrative, myth, and symbolism, all of which were previously decried by Modernist critics as retrograde. As with the Neo-Expressionists in Germany and the Transavantguardia in Italy, Puig was among the artists who began again to grapple with the ability of painting to picture ineffable sensations that lay beyond the contours of the ordinary sensible world. Puig’s career may have emerged in the 1980s, but he is heir to an artistic legacy rooted in the postwar European movements of Tachisme and Informel, exemplified by the work of Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Alberto Giacometti, and Puig’s fellow Catalan, Antoni Tápies. The hallmark of both styles was an emphasis on materiality, which resulted in paintings that communicated with both visual and tactile means. Heavily worked surfaces and thick impastos evoked the primordial, whether cave walls or simply inchoate matter (it is no coincidence that Lascaux, with contains some of the oldest and bestpreserved cave paintings, was discovered in 1940). Like the Informel and Tachiste artists before him, Puig uses unconventional tools to create varied textures and marks. Aside from brushes he deploys spatulas, pens, brush handles, and small iron bars. While he typically approaches the canvas with an image in mind, his method of working is both intuitive and visceral: he often pours paint directly onto canvas on the studio Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing
2
floor. He works quickly but with control; all the while he remains attentive to chance material accidents, allowing them to push the composition in unforeseen directions.
Jean Fautrier, Tete d’Otage no. 1 (Head of a Hostage No. 1)
The predominant themes in Puig’s work can also be understood in relation to the historical lens of Informel, which was typically both humanistic and anthropomorphic. Highlighting the courage and terror inherent to basic human action, for instance, Giacometti’s featureless, attenuated figures simply point or stride forward, simple yet powerful actions that are echoed in many of Puig’s compositions. Jean Fautrier’s Les Otages (“Hostages,” 1943-44) are decomposing heads, once witness to the unspeakable horrors of war, on the verge of disintegrating into the built-up surface of the canvas. While Puig’s work is not laden with the same trauma, the relationship between his disembodied “transparent figures” and Fautrier’s Otages—often outlined in profile—is unmistakable. Broadly, the duality within Informel of the iconicity of the image and the materiality of the surface is one of the tensions animating Puig’s work, which hovers somewhere between abstraction and figuration. This is particularly evident in his recent paintings of dancers, which are nothing more than skeins of thickly poured paint. Not unlike trying to see the pictorial constellations in the night sky, once we read the titles, graceful arcs of pigment cohere into raised limbs, curvilinear drips suggest the centrifugal force of motion itself.
Movement abounds in Puig’s work, in which bodies are rarely stationary—but walk, dance, float, undress, perform. In some cases they are even agitated by a mysterious breath: in Blowing to Venus, a large head, similar to those labeled transparent figures, appears to blow life into a sinuous Venus figure. Perhaps this is a birth of sorts: the disanimated body imbued with life by an otherworldly spirit. But in Painter Blowing, Puig identifies that numinous being as the artist. A metacommentary on the process of art making, Puig’s surrogate artist does not merely emulate, but like Pygmalion, it conjures life. Given the primeval quality of Puig’s surfaces, it is tempting to read these paintings as echoes of the earliest creative impulses. Shallow spaces and saturated, unmodulated colors foster an indeterminacy in the compositions; as a result time and place remain unfixed. Consequently we find ourselves just as readily in a postapocalyptic future as in the distant past. Roughly hewn grounds shot through with radioactive red anticipate the aftermath of an unnamed catastrophe. This inter- Blowing to Venus (detail) pretation is not as dark as it sounds: the very existence of these entities—the sun, dancers, the transparent figures, and most importantly, the artist—suggests, following disaster, the possibility of not just survival, but renewal. Whenever we are in time, a theme insinuated in the repetition of clocks in Puig’s work, these figures exist, which signals the capacity of art to prevail. Paula Burleigh Art Historian, New York
Painter blowing (detail) Jean Fautrier, Tete d’Otage no. 1 (Head of a Hostage No. 1) 1944, mixed media on paper mounted on linen Frame (wood): 15.5 x 15.625 x 1.875 in. (39.37 x 39.69 x 4.76 cm) Image: 13.75 x 10.75 in. (34.93 x 27.31 cm) The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing 1947, Bronze, 70.5 x 40.8 x 16.4 in.
3
4
Monumental red face figure mixed media on canvas 2017 144 x 121 in 370 x 310 cm
5
Blowing to Venus mixed media on wood 2017 47.5 x 58.5 in 122 x 150 cm
6
Face interior I mixed media on canvas 2017 24 x 19.5 in 61 x 50 cm
Face interior III mixed media on canvas 2017 35 x 24 in 90 x 62 cm
7
8
facing page:
Sunrise II mixed media on canvas 2017 78 x 78 in 200 x 200 cm
Equilibrist bronze 2016 32 x 26 x 6 in 83 x 66 x 16 cm
9
Seated figure and hand over red mixed media on canvas 2017 47.5 x 33 in 122 x 85 cm
10
11
Different figures together mixed media on canvas 2017 24 x 19.5 in 61 x 50 cm
12
Flying figure and red background mixed media on canvas 2017 24 x 19.5 in 61 x 50 cm
Background of transparent figures I mixed media on canvas 2017 47.5 x 35 in 122 x 91 cm
13
Figure and flowers mixed media on wood 2017 39 x 47.5 in 100 x 122 cm
14
Female red and black mixed media on canvas 2017 30 x 21 in 77 x 55 cm
Painter blowing mixed media on canvas 2017 34 x 24 in 88 x 61 cm
15
The three graces on stage mixed media on wood 2017 97.5 x 95 in 250 x 244 cm
16
Figures and geometrics mixed media on canvas 2017 66 x 47.5 in 170 x 122 cm
17
Embracing group mixed media on canvas 2017 58.5 x 47.5 in 150 x 122 cm
The dancers mixed media on wood 2017 39 x 47.5 in 100 x 122 cm
18
Backstage mixed media on canvas 2017 51 x 63 in 130 x 162 cm
19
Painter and dog mixed media on canvas 2017 51 x 63 in 130 x 162 cm
20
above left:
Face interior II mixed media on canvas 2017 47.5 x 33 in 122 x 85 cm above right:
Female figure and spheres mixed media on canvas 2017 24 x 19.5 in 61 x 50 cm left:
Couple and light mixed media on canvas 2017 47.5 x 35 in 122 x 90 cm
21
22
facing page:
Upholding hands mixed media on canvas 2017 58.5 x 48 in 150 x 123 cm
Dancer undressing mixed media on canvas 2017 47.5 x 35 in 122 x 91 cm
23
Figure and wings mixed media on wood 2017 35 x 47.5 in 90 x 122 cm
24
Dancers and numbers mixed media on wood 2017 47.5 x 58.5 in 122 x 150 cm
25
Ancient Egypt bath mixed media on canvas 2017 63 x 51 in 162 x 130 cm
26
Figures and shadows mixed media on wood 2017 47.5 x 62 in 122 x 160 cm
Non symmetrical mixed media on canvas 2017 48 x 62 in 123 x 160 cm
27
facing page:
Sunrise I mixed media on canvas 2017 66 x 47.5 in 170 x 122 cm
28
Field of poppies mixed media on canvas 2017 39 x 78 in 101 x 200 cm
Index bronze 9 Equilibrist mixed media on canvas 26 Ancient Egypt bath 13 Background of transparent figures I 19 Backstage 21 Couple and light 23 Dancer undressing 12 Different figures together 18 Embracing group 7 Face interior I 21 Face interior II 7 Face interior III 15 Female red and black 21 Female figure and red spheres 29 Field of poppies 17 Figures and geometrics 12 Flying figure and red background
5 Monumental red face figure 27 Non symmetrical 20 Painter and dog 15 Painter blowing IFC Red welcome 10 Seated figure and hand over red 28 Sunrise I 8 Sunrise II 22 Upholding hands mixed media on wood 6 Blowing to Venus 25 Dancers and numbers 14 Figure and flowers 24 Figure and wings 27 Figures and shadows 18 The dancers 16 The three graces on stage
WINTER 2017 Project Manager:
Graphics technician:
PHOTOGRAPHER:
Catalog Design:
Ken Amorino
Dani Rovira-Soler
Scott Saraceno
Susan Tsuchiya
Front cover: Sunrise II (detail), 2017 Back cover: Painter and dog, 2017 Envelope: Monumental red face figure, 2017
$40
www.franklinbowlesgallery.com
SAN FRANCISCO 765 Beach Street San Francisco CA 94109 415.441.8008 / 800.926.9535
NEW YORK 431 West Broadway New York NY 10012 212.226.1616 / 800.926.9537