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Lot Essay
Paquete is a rarely-exhibited example of one of the most important subjects developed during the career of Chilean-born artist Claudio Bravo. It certainly represents one of the high points of this painter's experiments with tactile form. Its criss-crossed strings appear to contain - only barely - an unknown object below the brown paper. The wrinkled paper is thickly folded over itself; forming a rough covering for something that strains to emerge from its shroud. The entire image is, in formal terms, a study in light and shadow effects, showing a remarkable expertise in trompe l'oeil painting. Its suggestions of three-dimensionality are palpable. From the more metaphorical point of view this work suggests psychological displacement and un-ease. The viewer is confronted with a substantial element that is unknown. In some of Bravo's package paintings the surface is smoother and more contained whereas here there is a more disturbing aura of volume and mass. The artist's convincing semblance of verisimilitude is all the more astonishing given the medium with which this image was created. Bravo produced this illusion-laden work in pastel which is itself a substance that intimates immediacy and even a transitory quality. Yet the artist has succeeded in creating a monumental stability with pastel, which he often employs for some of his most well-known works. In fact, a number of the package pictures, including the important example now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, were done in pastel.
Claudio Bravo, one of Latin America's premier realist artists, emerged from the academic environment of Santiago, Chile, where he received his initial training. He developed is characteristic subjects and styles in Madrid where he lived from 1961 to 1972 when he moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he now lives. In Spain he became part of a milieu of artists that included Antonio López García, Francisco López, Isabel Quintanilla and others. These artists were in part inspired by the traditions of Golden Age Spanish painting. While they - and Bravo - investigated the techniques and subjects of such Baroque masters as Velázquez and Zurbarán, they were also interested in creating metaphors for the uncertainties of contemporary life.
In the late 1960s Bravo began to paint and draw simple things such as shopping bags, and pieces of paper. These began as experiments in pure form but they also responded, in part, to the interest in artists in both Europe and the United States to depict the most ordinary of everyday objects. Pop artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg utilized common commercial products in their art. Bravo, for his part, did something analogous, but invested these depictions with a characteristic mixture of heightened realism and, in the works such as Paquete, a nod in the direction of the unknown or the transcendental. Bravo has also acknowledged that his package paintings are equally significant as studies in color. He has stated: "I suppose that the idea for these paintings came partly through looking at Mark Rothko's paintings of large fields of color and partly through works that [Spanish painter] Antoni Tapies had done using string across a canvas surface. I...investigated the abstract possibilities of the forms while still creating recognizable objects."
Bravo's package works were first seen in New York, where the artist spent many months in the 1960s and 70s. In November and December, the Staempfli Gallery on Madison Avenue showed twenty-two paintings of these subjects in an exhibition that was positively reviewed by The New York Times critic John Canaday. These package paintings struck a resonant chord among U.S. audiences who also saw in them relationships to the North American realist tradition of trompe l'oeil painting as developed in the nineteenth century by artists such as John Peto, John Haberle and Victor Dubreuil.
Bravo has continued to paint images that relate to the package series of which this Paquete is such a distinguished example. In his most recent body of work he has created large canvases - and pastels - of cloth drapery in which the artist continues to investigate similar visual problems as posed by the paper he depicted in these images of the 60s and 70s. Thus Paquete is an element of one of the key aspects of the art of Claudio Bravo. It represents both an important initial phase of his career and looks forward to the aesthetic and visual concerns of his most current artistic production.
Edward J. Sullivan
Claudio Bravo, one of Latin America's premier realist artists, emerged from the academic environment of Santiago, Chile, where he received his initial training. He developed is characteristic subjects and styles in Madrid where he lived from 1961 to 1972 when he moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he now lives. In Spain he became part of a milieu of artists that included Antonio López García, Francisco López, Isabel Quintanilla and others. These artists were in part inspired by the traditions of Golden Age Spanish painting. While they - and Bravo - investigated the techniques and subjects of such Baroque masters as Velázquez and Zurbarán, they were also interested in creating metaphors for the uncertainties of contemporary life.
In the late 1960s Bravo began to paint and draw simple things such as shopping bags, and pieces of paper. These began as experiments in pure form but they also responded, in part, to the interest in artists in both Europe and the United States to depict the most ordinary of everyday objects. Pop artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg utilized common commercial products in their art. Bravo, for his part, did something analogous, but invested these depictions with a characteristic mixture of heightened realism and, in the works such as Paquete, a nod in the direction of the unknown or the transcendental. Bravo has also acknowledged that his package paintings are equally significant as studies in color. He has stated: "I suppose that the idea for these paintings came partly through looking at Mark Rothko's paintings of large fields of color and partly through works that [Spanish painter] Antoni Tapies had done using string across a canvas surface. I...investigated the abstract possibilities of the forms while still creating recognizable objects."
Bravo's package works were first seen in New York, where the artist spent many months in the 1960s and 70s. In November and December, the Staempfli Gallery on Madison Avenue showed twenty-two paintings of these subjects in an exhibition that was positively reviewed by The New York Times critic John Canaday. These package paintings struck a resonant chord among U.S. audiences who also saw in them relationships to the North American realist tradition of trompe l'oeil painting as developed in the nineteenth century by artists such as John Peto, John Haberle and Victor Dubreuil.
Bravo has continued to paint images that relate to the package series of which this Paquete is such a distinguished example. In his most recent body of work he has created large canvases - and pastels - of cloth drapery in which the artist continues to investigate similar visual problems as posed by the paper he depicted in these images of the 60s and 70s. Thus Paquete is an element of one of the key aspects of the art of Claudio Bravo. It represents both an important initial phase of his career and looks forward to the aesthetic and visual concerns of his most current artistic production.
Edward J. Sullivan