拍品专文
Painted in 1984, Holy Night was exhibited in Julian Schnabel's first exhibition at the Pace Gallery, with plate paintings, tarpaulin paintings and paintings on velvet. Schnabel is most associated with plate paintings, but his use of velvet as a surface marked another important act in Schnabel's desire to use unconventional materials in his work.
Schnabel's introduction of different-colored velvet as
support was as consequential for his art as his use of broken
crockery. For velvet's light-absorbing capacity creates an
indefinite depth, no matter whether the composition is relief-
like...or free-floating....Thin oil paint is soaked off by
the velvet and thus makes the lineaments recede behind
the picture plane, whereas opaque oils or aluminum
paint seem to hover in front of it, an effect sometimes
countered by the application of powdered marble paste.
The deep and saturated color conveys endless space and a surreal vision of the unconscious.
Holy Night...depicts a ruinous gate, engraved with occult signs, frames a hybrid territory, half graveyard, half rising forest as in Macbeth. Club-like shapes,
specked like poisonous mushrooms, shoot up amidst
the upheavals of the earth. Complete with demonic animals,
the scene is set for an incantation. A school-marmish
sorcerer's apprentice has succeeded in calling up a medieval
magician, his giant head crossed by a sinister glare. But
her contact with the netherworld doesn't do her any good.
One of the clubs hits her under her right eye. This
causes her troubled face to emit a phosphorescence. A
much heavier club threatens her from above as it is attached
to the gate (G. Schiff, "Julian Schnabel and the
Mythography of Feeling," Julian Schnabel, Pace
Gallery, New York 1984, n.p.).
Schnabel is concerned, in what he has called his search for the 'collective subjective', with universal imagery. His sources are relatively commonplace and printed books, magazines and perhaps more often, earlier art. Yet when he plunders this, he finds memorably romantic figures and elements. Schnabel is taking the situations that are important to him and projecting them through his feelings, or, the memories of his feelings...This memory trace is what his sources are reduced to, and, at this remove, the sources become unimportant to him; what matters for him is how he is able to use them to make the paintings overwhelmingly effective (R. Francis, Julian Schnabel, The Tate Gallery 1982, London 1982, p. 12).
Schnabel's introduction of different-colored velvet as
support was as consequential for his art as his use of broken
crockery. For velvet's light-absorbing capacity creates an
indefinite depth, no matter whether the composition is relief-
like...or free-floating....Thin oil paint is soaked off by
the velvet and thus makes the lineaments recede behind
the picture plane, whereas opaque oils or aluminum
paint seem to hover in front of it, an effect sometimes
countered by the application of powdered marble paste.
The deep and saturated color conveys endless space and a surreal vision of the unconscious.
Holy Night...depicts a ruinous gate, engraved with occult signs, frames a hybrid territory, half graveyard, half rising forest as in Macbeth. Club-like shapes,
specked like poisonous mushrooms, shoot up amidst
the upheavals of the earth. Complete with demonic animals,
the scene is set for an incantation. A school-marmish
sorcerer's apprentice has succeeded in calling up a medieval
magician, his giant head crossed by a sinister glare. But
her contact with the netherworld doesn't do her any good.
One of the clubs hits her under her right eye. This
causes her troubled face to emit a phosphorescence. A
much heavier club threatens her from above as it is attached
to the gate (G. Schiff, "Julian Schnabel and the
Mythography of Feeling," Julian Schnabel, Pace
Gallery, New York 1984, n.p.).
Schnabel is concerned, in what he has called his search for the 'collective subjective', with universal imagery. His sources are relatively commonplace and printed books, magazines and perhaps more often, earlier art. Yet when he plunders this, he finds memorably romantic figures and elements. Schnabel is taking the situations that are important to him and projecting them through his feelings, or, the memories of his feelings...This memory trace is what his sources are reduced to, and, at this remove, the sources become unimportant to him; what matters for him is how he is able to use them to make the paintings overwhelmingly effective (R. Francis, Julian Schnabel, The Tate Gallery 1982, London 1982, p. 12).