Ca’Rezzonico:

Usually I skip the very Late Baroque. It is too close to the Rococo, and I can see that creeping effete weirdness blossoming in the paintings. That's why Tiepolo is always difficult for me. The colors are fantastic, just stunning, but I have a tough time with the way his figures lean heavily into that creepy Roccoco solipsism. There is a strong illustrational quality to the work and at times it collapses into silliness without actually meaning to. It is a highly mannered sort of painting meant for upper class sensibilities and overwrought architectural interior designers. Tiepolo was a grand painter. Time and his lackluster Venetian contemporaries have given him a polished sheen. His open skies and beautiful color is unequaled. But for me his work is a capitulation of Tintoretto's legacy through the damning influence of French upper class tastes. I can’t find a way through the illusions and allusions. I am left to look elsewhere for a real experience. His world doesn’t encompass my sensibilities. It doesn’t bring me in to his. Painting must tell the artist's truth. With Tiepolo I find that I've been lied to, I am led through the chromatics and hues with the promise of some visual encounter. Unfortunately those beautiful painterly skies and luxurious set piece fall away in the sugary illustrations of his figures. The work is all about light and gloss, how silk shimmers, how eyes glisten, how gold and silver gleam. It is a ruse without the hidden reality. I don't mind the optical lie, but I want to know the visual truth. Tiepolo, flat out, denies me that understanding. I can't play along because he secretly believes in the gloss. His world is elegant, grand and disappointing.

To my mind abstraction like other forms of painting is experiencing a similar situation today. American Post-Industrial Abstraction has overly refined the uses of its painterly materiality, creating a thick paste of slickly manufactured consumer abstraction. Today's mannerism, evidenced by its visual uselessness, is spun through academic permutations of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism and the too tasteful presentations of these works in extravagant loft spaces. This cloying academic painting is one of the reasons for the dearth of exciting abstraction in our contemporary art world and it parallels Tiepolo’s time. Up on the palace's top floor is a plethora of academic painting that is just about as lackluster as you can get. Tiepolo wasn't alone in this visual capitulation. Lots of strange soft focus anatomy and stacks of Bob Ross-ish made up landscapes crowd the walls. You can see that some of these painters had talent and were schooled in all the right moves, but you'll find precious little feeling or visual poetry presented in these works. Mostly, it looks as if the artists painted what they knew and not what they experienced. They were painting for an audience's expectations and looking to cash in. These are professional paintings, made by the trained, officially recognized artist for the connoisseurs of collecting.

A couple of floors below Longhi’s work looks unschooled, goofy, and engaging, which gives them charm. There is a room full of these little paintings of everyday life. People hang out, drink, sell, chat, and basically live like we do, only they are dressed in long coats, three corner hats, and huge swaths of silk. Longhi painted one face for everyone - male or female, young or old; probably an idealized version of his own. We have our Longhi painters working today, feted by critics, because there is a thirst for something different. The problem, then as now, is that professionalism rules the establishment. It is choking the lifeblood out of true innovation. In a world of highbrow over-refinement charm can be a refreshing change. These little paintings with the goofy looking figures and mundane activities are packed with it. The critics are charmed, the collectors are enthused and the grand machine of art economics continues to churn. But charm doesn't reach for something more. It doesn't push at the boundaries of painting and open up new possibilities. Charm is about entertaining.

On the other hand, ambition, charm's ugly brother, can be a dangerous thing. I’ve seen many an overblown visual statement come marching on the scene to deflate and zip around the room like a day old birthday balloon. The eighties were full of those types of artists. Some fell away, some went on to successful other careers, and a few of them are ensconced in blue chip galleries making the same work they made 20 years ago. The nineties seem to come and go without a wave of painterly innovation. It also saw the institutionalization of Postmodernism. To this day, 6 years into a new century (which promises unimaginable leaps in human capabilities,) after the stunning and horrible World Trade Center cataclysm, during the vicious, murderous and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this failed aesthetic practice remains the darling of the academies and the lifeblood of art commerce. Piffle.

Ambition demands failure. It demands you put it all on the line. The problem is that most investors won’t go to the line with artists, no matter how talented. Matisse risked his career and his livelihood many times through the years, and in Hilary Spurling’s new book, you can sense the dread that he felt every time he pushed his visual ideas a little further. He had a family to provide for and his everyday problems were thick. Regardless, he continued on pushing that worn envelope right into the clenched fist of history. Balls of steel.

Team Chelsea and the academics prefer to stay out of the risk business and have taken the corporate standstill posture, following the market and outsourcing the talent. What should we be looking for in painting today? Matisse and Picasso pushed away from the acadamies as did most of the previous innovations in painting's history. In there time there was a realignment of power, the promise of new technologies and the waning of European power. There was a break with tradition, and a new visual experience made it's way into our consciousness. Our time is not dissimilar and a break in our visual experience is imminent. Technology has changed the way we see, the things we see and how we see them. What does this space look like? How does it work? How do we encounter visualization? Is depth part of it? How do we measure a likeness? Is our experience mediated through the singularity of an electronic lens, and if so, does natural binary vision critique or encapsulate this lens-based opticality? How is our emotional experience distributed through these media networks? How would this "look" in a painting? What is more "real," the experience through flesh or the experience through media? What painting experience determines this? If we are watched through technology does this make us part of "reality" or part of "media?" If our extensions push us out into the world, if our tools extend our physical beings, what is our reach or our influence and how are we affected by it? How would this be relayed in a painting? Is abstraction enough of a tool to visualize this? Can paint be a tool to discuss these issues in a new and provocative way?

In Ca Rezzonico it is all about retaining the status quo, maintaining power, wealth and influence. The painting is a fawning, hyped up, massage of decadent visual imperatives and values. The repudiation of the Rococco was a return to classical values. The re-emergence of stability, structure and old time values occasioned by the rise of the Proletarian Empire builders, was nothing but reactionary painterly stodginess. It would take a number of years before true innovation would begin to turn in the painting world. Hopefully, my colleagues will not remain satisfied for quite that long.