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Philip von Raabe:
Printworks Gallery One of the first lessons of young art students is that language does not grasp reality. Grass is not green, bark is not brown, and black -- the absence of color -- if ample, creates a jarring blemish which drains light and life from a painting. In reality, light and hues are reflected, scattered, merged and re-emitted in limitless permutations. And humans add still further individual and subjective interpretations as well. It took the West centuries to not just look, but actually see and deal with what we see; to create authentic illusion using brush and paint. That achievement has been even more difficult in printmaking. And to conceive of color and light as media, and further create abstract visions by manual process and inspired technique requires uncommon gifts. Over a dozen prints currently on view at Printworks, Chicago, attest to that. "Philip von Raabe: Recent Monoprints" will be on exhibit there until March 16, 2002. A majority of these prints were created this past year, 2001. Von Raabe begins with a kernel of an idea, but then freely develops it through a variety of techniques and materials. Two of these prints, Dancing Willow (17 1/4"x17 1/4") and Nachturno Paradisio (17 1/4"x17 1/4"), caused one viewer to call von Raabe a master of shades of grey. There are no greys, but rather deep, luminous values of tone enriched by subtle and elusive hues. And other monoprints in this showing expand such subtleties into sights such as are seen in dreaming, full in color and reflecting natural forms in a melee of associations. Here is a mind's library of attributes, shapes and qualities; all re-woven by a clever and deceptive eye which plays on what it only thought it saw. "Recent Monoprints," by Philip von Raabe, is well worth the visit.
Summit (39"x27 1/2") is one of the first in this show and highlights some of von Raabe's approach. It appears as a solid, solitary stump; a portrait of a clean-cut veteran tree; a mesa for the smallest eyes of things that crawl below. Yet its skin is not familiar, textured bark, but a flat-cut panel woodgrain: tree... wood, as unnaturally processed, and as mentally and commonly catalogued by memory. Von Raabe, in many of these prints, employs a chine colle technique, laying dampened paper components, paste-side up, on a press. With an overlying support then placed over these pieces, the ensemble is run through the press, giving a smooth bond and otherwise unobtainable effects. With chine colle, the manner in which textured, tinted, thin or exotic papers take inks differently can be exploited to great effect. In Summit, the first sights of once-living tree, surrounded by dark ambience and brought into clarity by soft red glow, resolves out of a basic, categorical shorthand -- woodgrain. Monoprints are, by definition, unique instances. In printmaking, monoprints share this distinction with monotypes. The latter, however, are produced from a single, unsupplemented printing surface, while monoprints recruit an arsenal of additional processes. Von Raabe's Tarantella (17 1/4"x17 1/4":1999) would seem to emphasize distinction and variation. Two central papers, each with a kindred image, rest within a blue supporting field: at left this is a splattered charcoal blue rectangular area; at right, a more uniform blue has been chosen. The leftmost of the central, affixed twin sheets, displays an urchin-like motif rendered by printing black over a multi-color ground. The rectangle at center right reinterprets the artist's motif -- a prickly "tarantella" in paint -- by linework scrapped into a black overlay, creating its image by exposing an underlying red base: red line within a black matrix. A general sense is that the eye has hunted down an invertebrate on high-dose stimulants... in what may be a playful metaphor which grasps the dance. Some visual elements appear as recurrent forms in von Raabe's prints on display at Printworks, Chicago. In Tempest (17 1/4"x17 1/4"), the composition's focus is centered in a basic, framing support which is split into a left half where a black overprint is incised to expose a yellow base -- yellow line from beneath rich black. At right, an upper quarter of charcoal blue balances a lower counterpart in light blue. The centerpoint is, however, a turbulent mass of flow, a cloud, in blues and purple hues. Von Raabe's monoprints, several times in isolated fields of pattern, reconstruct similar chaotic flows -- as clouds, as liquid wanderings, as galactic streams. Tempest functions as an attribute, distilled, and not a simple reference. This is fine work.
In several pieces here, this 'flow' motif recalls the suggestiveness which drew the attentions of J.M.W. Turner and James McNeill Whistler. It is particularly successful in von Raabe's print, To Iris (27 1/2"x30 1/2"). Here, an upper half of ground is worked in blue-greens; a yellow 'drip-strip' band stands as a horizon; and below all this seethes a Turner-esque cosmic vortex: stellar arches and a turbulence of reds, purples, even yellows -- the sightings of Mount Palomar reside beneath a suggestion of a placid earth. This is one of several un-matted works, left framed as whole, with ragged paper edge. In a work such as Untitled (29"x24 1/2"), completed just prior to this show, the artist's use of fluid rendering takes on a more restrictive nature: the loose edges of color mass tend toward the long-term forging of rock -- marbling. This, in instinct, works. In this newest piece, these splatter and marbling effects accentuate the skill and delicacy of prismatic mimicry in the print's upper image. In that upper portion of this print, one finds vague shadows cast against a window glass in the rain, echoes of lenses splitting light, a repertoire of familiar attributes -- the sights we note against the cognitive realities that seem to shelter them. Heartscape (23"x17") would seem to add a further level to the work, and yet it too favors what is seen as primary matter over what is rationally supposed. In Heartscape, a viewer finds a semblance of East Asian calligraphy, but it is the stroke of hand and final form, not the sense contained, which informs von Raabe's art. This monoprint postulates, much like Noam Chomsky as linguist, that the fundamental fact is not a specified script, a tongue, or even ordered logic, but rather the self-creating impulse which is their source that is a primal question and, as well, a fascinating fact. This monoprint was printed with three parts. Von Raabe used masks, coverings, to maintain a strict flatness among the consolidated sheets. And, although green and red are, properly, complementary hues, here, as throughout the Printworks gallery selection, chromatic oppositions are disciplined toward a vibrant collaboration of nuanced color. If a liquid dynamic appears and re-appears among these prints, one finds, not just flow, but 'float' as well. Von Raabe's Bobber (17 1/4"x17 1/4") sets example for this idiom. Here, within a background, which also serves as a coloristic frame, the color ranges from vibrant black at image base to pure blues and cerulean at top. In Bobber, von Raabe sets a middle paper immersed with yellow and discreet reds at top. Below this, in a lower half, quasi-blacks intermix with deepened greens. The 'bobber' itself reveals a light dot grid pattern, a chosen consequence of the artist's materials. The focus is ultimately a bobber, simplified into visual artifact. Its environs are more ambiguous -- abstracted space, reductive blends of color. In a kindred piece, Float (23"x32"), the gallery visitor finds what seems a poppy set adrift against a stylized locale, more than any naturalistic prop. This print too is framed as 'ragged-edge,' without a matt, which contributes to its final presence. (In much of this exhibition, the framing is well chosen -- whether print neatly defined by covering matt, or left displayed with full ragged-edged sheet mounted under glass.) City Lights (31"x21"), the work featured on Printworks's mailing card, is a fine example of the artist's attention to surface textures, real and implied. (This contributes to the final works as much as color skill and intended or materially determined form.) City Lights, in which an eerily subliminal globe hovers above an emergent block, appears a tribute of today's psychology to German artist, Paul Klee. But, von Raabe achieves this end with monoprint, not oils depicting future dreams on cloth. An honest appraisal must admit virtuosity as well as inspiration. Again, here is an art well worth a trip to see.
Von Raabe's Early Elements (23 1/2"x17 1/2") might well represent basic building blocks for nature scenes... or, as well, a fundamental precis for life on earth. A dark line, cross-cut pattern dominates the orange rectangle at upper center. A middle third area presents a nearly homogeneous blue field, while the lower third of that central block is a black ink printing over green 'foliage' hues -- a silhouette reversed. With Early Elements, as with all these prints, a viewer is advised to stop, to view the work, and disregard all else. Early Elements is another print where the choice of displaying the full sheet, rough-edged, adds to the presentation. Philip von Raabe has been a professor of art at Ohio State University for thirty years. This exhibition underscores not just ability, or inspiration, but technical skill as well. These all collaborate: each aspect drives the others. The very process of art is revealed here, as well as excellence in the end result. Von Raabe builds his colors and a subtle luminosity through demanding skills, without ever generating 'mud.' The artist does use "T bar" registration (where a paper sheet in press aligns against a fixed bar at its top and a guide set at that paper's lower edge -- all to keep successive printing runs 'in sync'). He also takes registration by template -- a surrogate pattern -- rather than directly from the print. And there are instances, where the artist discards results: either for aesthetic reasons (an impulse did not come to fruition) or due to less-than-satisfactory procedure (the materials did not coalesce and bring it off). Language does not grasp reality. The mere word reduces it. An art such as von Raabe's monoprints restores a vital domain to sight: a subjective sense, an enduring pleasure. Each print is both artist's insight and an experience shared with the visitor. Twelve recent monoprints by Philip von Raabe will be on exhibit at Printworks, Chicago, until March 16, 2002. Additional prints by the artist are available at the gallery. --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. |
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