There are works of art whose intrinsic visual power is added to by the legend that accompanies them. As is the case of The Rose (1958-66), the painting that Jay DeFeo (1929-89) obsessively shaped, layer by layer, over eight years. Some historians refer to the work as the most iconic within the American art scene of that time. However, for two decades, it existed, essentially, as a rumor.
Initially, the work was titled Deathrose. She weighed over a ton. It was more than three meters tall. It completely covered the largest window of the author's home, on Fillmore Street, San Francisco, within a space that seemed to have been transformed into a work of art in itself; The floor and the sidewalk were covered with pieces of paint whose fleshy texture sparkled with the shiny powder that the painter mixed with the black and white pigments. “It was like entering a temple that was almost living,” said Bruce Conner, a close friend of the artist. When the rent went up, the painter was evicted and the window had to be cut to remove the work. A feat that appears in the short film made by Conner, The White Rose (1967). The Rose It was exhibited in 1969, before being moved to the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where the artist taught classes. Given the first signs of deterioration, the work was protected with plaster, but as its size increased it could not exit through the same place it had entered, to complete the restoration. That is how it remained, until years later when a false wall was built in front of the painting, giving rise to the rumor, as widespread as it was accurate, that the legendary work had been buried alive. In 1995, on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to Beat culture, and organized by the Whitney Museum, the work was recovered to be included in the exhibition. Today it can be seen in the permanent collection of said center.
The artist's reputation has rested primarily on this work, which over time has acquired the aura of a majestic relic, which explains, in part, the reason why DeFeo's powerful and poetic photographic work has gone unnoticed. In it you can see the same dedication and experimental desire that is perceived in the pictorial work, and yet, until very recently, no one had stopped to analyze its scope. The fortuitous discovery of all the photographic images, taken throughout the artist's career, inside a box – where other types of documents were supposed to be kept – has allowed the necessary re-evaluation, and, for the moment, has resulted in a magnificent and forceful monograph, Jay DeFeo: Photographic Workcomposed of 150 images, many of them reproduced to scale.
The author exhibited her photographic work only once in her life and showed it as a complementary study to her pictorial work. Her first attempts with the camera date back to the 1950s. In the following decade she made collages using the photographs she took of her friends and herself, pieces that she referred to as “Dada jokes.”. It will be in 1970, when her passion for the medium becomes accentuated and lasts for a fruitful period of five years, in which she will learn technical skills intuitively, guided by the clues provided by her SFAI students. Her visit to an exhibition dedicated to Man Ray's photography encourages the author to let herself be carried away by the accidental and explore error. “I have neither the temperament nor the facilities to follow the hard technical path to perfection,” she said. Some of her early subjects include shoes, and her own extracted teeth, which she will photograph on a recurring basis and which she will refer to as “my skeletal remains.” It is in the strangeness of her imagery that the reminiscences of the spirit of Dora Maar and Max Ernst are most appreciated. Under DeFeo's gaze, objects are what they are at the same time that they cease to be what they are. Thus the detail of a trunk resembles the eye of an elephant, the waves of the sea become fantastic creatures, and the back of a densely upholstered chair takes on the materiality of a living being, while the fragments of the human body are presented as artifacts and the organic merges with the mechanical. The camera becomes a powerful mediator in the negotiation between the artist's fantasy and reality. “The lens really taught me how to see, and really see,” DeFeo said. Through a look that is as analytical and incisive as it is poetic, full of layered nuances, the author challenges the viewer to reveal what is hidden layer by layer.
In his darkroom DeFeo will shape a series of chemigramaslike the series Salvador Dali's Birthday Party, where the border between painting and photography is blurred. Likewise, the artist will cut the negatives without hesitation, invert them, multiply the images and play with their proportions. A process of transformation and reconfiguration that results in unpredictable and enigmatic abstractions.
The artist knew how to see the opportunities offered by the photographic medium at a time as decisive as the seventies, when photography became respectable in America and entered the art market. And she will do so by keeping the pulse between her most experimental vein and her permeability to the onslaught of the modernist tradition of the so-called straight photography. It is in the hundreds of botanical images where his links with the f/64 group and his demand for a pure and clearly defined photography are most appreciated. Thus, in DeFeo we find a photography that is as experimental as it is direct and descriptive, which will also delve into the materiality of the photographic medium as an object. “In the same way that The Rose represents a fundamental revaluation of the properties of paint and tests the limits that define painting itself, his photographic work unleashes an intentional and extensive exploration of the medium,” highlights Colin Keller in one of the texts included in the monograph.
The artist would say that the photographic medium opened paths to her pictorial practice, considering it “a complementary expression” to her painting. In this way, she will use photography to document the progress of her pictorial works. So, while the camera captured the work from all possible angles, it had the ability to transform the subject into something completely new. DeFeo's photographic work “served two seemingly incompatible purposes: it made the world understandable, but also strange,” notes Keller.
The cover of the new publication is occupied by a photograph that the artist kept in her studio. In it you can see the Nefertiti bust, in front of White Spica; one of the first works of the North American author, made in the early 1950s, remained unfinished. Her name is that of a star, and like the beautiful pharaoh, she speaks to us through time, along with a black, square mirror where the author's reflection returns us to the present. The enigmatic image seems to encompass all the layers that shape DeFeo's work; the history of art, its own, the act of examining, remaking, extirpating, erasing, subverting, and transfiguring; meditation on the object, as a way to transcend the everyday in search of the universal and the eternal.
'Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work'. Jay DeFeo. DelMonico Books/The Jay DeFeo Foundation. 256 pages. 82 euros.
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