IMAGES ONTO INFINITY

BY David Pagel

Magnification and miniaturization cross paths in Victor Raphael’s altered Polaroids. Intensely concentrated, but still expansive, his pictures mark out a territory in which extreme shifts in scale mirror fantasy’s capacity to move through worlds incommensurate with physical reality.

Raphael’s images turn to photography not to verify the facts of the visible world, but to document the impossibility of excluding, from this world, the play of the imagination. His conjunctions of the taken and the made function like constellations. At once integral parts of the natural world and cultural projections onto its random order, these astral mappings model Raphael’s own work on the cosmos.

Ancient astronomers and sailors used the stars as a sort of connect-the-dots drawing board. They found heroic and mythical figures in the sky and thus located their ships at sea, and themselves in a meaningful universe - in a world in which nature was the basis for a complex and effective, if highly artificial, system of signification.  Likewise, the contemporary artist uses modern technology to chart a fantastic cosmology in which myth intermingles with reality and fantasy inflicts the “facts.” Raphael’s manipulated Polaroids transform the appearance of the visible world to give form to the whims and idiosyncrasies of his rich, personal vision.

By working on and with photographs, Raphael ensures that the machinations of his imagination take place in the external world. Like much modernist painting, his images follow abstraction back through automatic writing and psychoanalysis to its roots in an individual’s unconscious. Like much photography, his art emphasizes that it exists in a shared, social space. Raphael’s painted Polaroids thus find points of intersection between inner and outer worlds.

In Raphael’s images, the known commingles with the unverifiable. In this space between the past and the future, time folds back upon itself: the present is continually renewed as a fleeting moment whose unremarkable ordinariness signals not its simplicity, but our blindness to the myriad configurations that give it shape.

Raphael’s altered Polaroids trace an emergent awareness of the often-invisible forces that lurk beneath the surface of the immediately visible world. Here, events unfold with time-defying simultaneity. As history is (re-)written and common images are (re-)configured, subjective states and objective approaches shift positions, giving back to the ordinary world a sense of its extraordinariness.

Three series made over the past eleven years constitute Raphael’s exhibition. The general intentions and broad purposes of “Space Fields,” “Abstractions,” and “Jackson Pollock” overlap and build upon one another to form a coherent whole in which fantasy puts a mesmerizing spin on reality as it pushes myth and empiricism together and pulls the artist’s imagination into the shared visual world. Nevertheless, each of Raphael’s series focuses on particular issues, which define his peculiar vision.

Raphael’s “Jackson Pollock” series is both an homage to the founder of American gestural abstraction and a double-edged meditation on the arbitrariness of fate - on why the lives of some disappear into anonymity and others disappear into myths. In either case, whatever is preserved tells little about what actually existed. This series consists of Polaroids taken from the notorious film of Pollock making his trademark drip-paintings and others of Raphael - made-up to heighten his resemblance of the dead Abstract Expressionist - posing before a painting of Pollock’s, his studio, and grave. Raphael has blocked out, from all his photographs, selected segments. These areas of metallic leaf and lines of acrylic paint look like angelic intercessions into the mundane reality depicted by cheap snapshots. These shimmering intrusions emphasize the pictures’ otherworldly splendor and redeem them from being conventional paeans to the myth of American originality. The real and the staged figures in Raphael’s retouched photographs often appear as shadows or silhouettes. Sometimes they look like ghostly outlines. At others they totally dissolve into shiny camouflage of abstract splashes made up of seamlessly smooth emulsion, encrusted metal leaf, and thick droplets of metallic acrylic paint. As if pieced together from materials from different times, Raphael’s homages to Pollock acknowledge the inimitable nature of his actions as they preserve his achievement by opening it to reinterpretation and play.

Raphael’s “Space Field” series uses Polaroids taken from N.A.S.A. programs on television to create a rather literal but no less effective collision between formal abstraction and illusionistic deep space. His popularization of somewhat esoteric painterly issues takes seriously both the realm of aesthetics and that of the mass media. Raphael’s photographs of stars, planets, comets, novas, galaxies, rocketships, and eclipses play the luscious hyper-real colors of the high-tech devices that bring us images of outer space against Modernist painting’s well-worn attempt to create a third dimension out of two, without violating the integrity of the picture plane. In the same way that he blocked out parts of each image in his “Pollock” series, he fills in sections of his “Space Field” series with dabs of acrylic, orbs of metallic leaf, and swirls of each mixed together. These highly reflective and often thick layers contrast radically with the slick surfaces of the Polaroids. At some angels they appear to be three-dimensional additions to the pictures while at others - when they directly catch bright light - they seem to dissolve altogether, becoming almost blinding elements within the illusionistic deep space of the photographs. Many of the images in Raphael’s “Space Field” series derive from the quivering optical fields Pollock created with his electrifying drip paintings, punctuated, as they were, with metallic pigment, coagulated globs of paint, and odds-and-ends the artist found around his studio. It is not difficult to imagine that Raphael’s works are snap-shots taken on a tour throughout the spaces created by Pollock’s magisterial canvases.

Raphael dispenses with naturalistic references in his “Abstraction” series. If his “Space Field” works allow fantasy to enter the picture, but anchored its play with some recognizable markets, his “Abstraction” series is more promiscuous in its admission of this slippery force: its images abandon such constraints for a more free-wheeling foray into the possibilities of picture-making. it is as if the artist felt too constrained or crowded in outer space so moved to a realm in which the vicissitudes of his imagination and the qualities of his materials would not be even partially governed by representational duties.  The altered Polaroids in this series most compellingly play out the potential of Pollock’s fields of cosmic energy. They do so, however, in terms that are Raphael’s own. The found and the made are always in tension in his inventive re-use of appropriated images. Absolute originality is not an issue for the artist who would rather tease beauty out of the unremarkable than pretend to attempt to create something out of nothing. These altered photographs also intensify the shifts in scale that got lost in Raphael’s “Space Field” series. With the “Abstractions”, we are never given the security of a stable, overall scale. Instead, we are catapulted from the microscopic to the galactic: the tiny Polaroids seem to be taken through a microscope or out the window of a jet or an interplanetary rocketship. Raphael’s willingness to manipulate the photographs he uses as a base for his paintings and rubbings add to the ambiguous richness of this series. Motion more aggressively enters their fields as the grounds become, in some cases, out of focus and blurred. The layers of metal leaf and strokes of gold and silver acrylic take on greater complexity and delicacy as they register the artist’s increasing confidence and facility. In this series, Medieval icons are often evoked. Their pristine and impenetrable gold-leafed skies peel away and crumble, to reveal the deep blue of a naturalistic skyscape. This shift in perspectives opens onto another transformation as the luminous glow from the “real” sky suddenly seems more like that from a video monitor.

These shifts and inconsistencies energize all of Raphael’s altered Polaroids. Seen together, they form a charged constellation or a web that catches some perceptions as it allows others to pass through. Raphael’s art attests to his success in giving form to the present without destroying its fluidity.

David Pagel, 1991

Santa Monica College catalogue