Ad Laudes

“I’m not a religious artist,” Bravo once acknowledged, “but like great non-Catholic composers who wrote masses, I feel comfortable doing religious paintings” (in E. Sullivan, Claudio Bravo, New York, 1985, p. 76). Raised in a conservative Catholic environment and educated by Jesuits in his native Chile, Bravo developed an early interest in Spanish mystical spirituality, later stimulated by his readings of John of the Cross and Teresa de Ávila. He gravitated toward the religious painters of the Spanish Golden Age, notably Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurburán, during his formative years in Madrid, but it was his removal to Tangier in 1972 that most enriched his understanding of the divine. “The intensity of spiritual vision which was already inherent in Bravo’s imagination was both underscored and transformed through his contacts with the Islamic world,” Edward Sullivan has remarked. “The concentration of emotional force with which Bravo is faced through his contacts with everyday life in Morocco has served, more than anything else, as a catalyst to reinvigorate his predisposition for seeing the world through a veil of spirituality” (“Obsession and Meditation: A Decade of Work by Claudio Bravo,” Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings (1964/2004), New York, 2005, p. 256). Bravo painted religious subjects throughout his career, but perhaps none so exquisitely as his late-career series of cloth studies, a hyperrealist paean to color and light.
“I painted thirty-seven enormous pictures of hanging cloth over a period of two years,” Bravo remarked, in retrospect. “Wouldn’t you call that an obsession?” (in “Conversation with Edward Sullivan,” Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings (1964/2004), op. cit., p. 148). He worked on the series from 1997 to 2002, approaching his subject with persistence—as a practice of perfection—and rich, ecclesiastical pageantry. A lyrical exegesis of praise, Ad Laudes interprets the matins (ad Matutinas Laudes) through cascading draperies, their colors—jade and moss green, ecru and taupe—incarnating the ancient and traditional solemnity of the office. Ad Laudes is one of the thirty-two cloth paintings, many of them monumental in proportion, that Bravo exhibited at Marlborough Gallery in 1999. Christened with religious titles, the series distills Biblical drama from the joyful Annunciation and Adventus to the somber Good Friday and Dies Irae; twelve paintings are named after the Apostles, honored alongside Seraphim, Pontifici, and Angelis. “One feels a tantalizing mix of the spiritual and the sensual,” wrote critic Ken Johnson. “The billowing, crinkly robes enveloping Jesus, Mary or saints in countless Renaissance pictures come to mind, as do the rich fabrics still used in Roman Catholic liturgy.” Like his iconic paintings of paper and packages, the cloth series channels modernist self-referentiality. “The edge-to-edge fabric and the allover flickering of light and shadow create an almost abstract frontality, while color becomes an end in itself,” Johnson notes. “Indeed, you could think of this work not as realism but as a kind of soulfully enriched Color Field painting” (“Art in Review; Claudio Bravo,” New York Times, 14 April 2000).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park