|
![[virgin mary]](img2/vmary.gif)
Increased critical appreciation for the art of
exact duplication provides us
all with a fresh perspective on the work of Rafael Quance. Once dismissed as a
mere Kostabi-esque purveyor
of one-hit
wonders from the assemblyline, Quance
has emerged in recent weeks as an artist of almost limitless versatility in limning
the human experience.
Our first experience with Quance's work is his legendary Virgin Mary, composed
when the artist was but a precocious teen. All the earmarks of ardent youth are here:
the model's direct gaze, the hopeful positioning of the hands, the adaptation of
local religious themes. Clearly this is the work of a naive and optimistic prodigy:
The next figure in Quance's Virgin Mary series, completed when the artist
was in his early twenties and still nursing the loss of his one great love, presents a
remarkably more pained persona. Here the figure's piteous expression seems to speak
directly to the artist's own trauma, and the position of the hands - one inner-directed,
the other extended in sympathy, seem tailored for Quance's exquisite pathos:
The oddest figure in the Virgin Mary series is surely the painting completed
later in the decade, when Quance's involvement with D'Annunzio and the Nationalist
school prompted a fascination with symbols and iconography, seen clearly here in the
motif of the "sacred heart" and the mannerist positioning of hands and tilted head:
It wasn't until midlife that Quance's gifts as an ironist really manifested themselves,
in a Virgin Mary painting, in which the artist makes full use of simple
peasant imagery (the shrine Madonna familiar to most churchgoers in Quance's native
province) for his own wry ends:
Thus we can't help but be disappointed by the Virgin Mary Quance completed when
he was nearing 50, burdened with a growing family and more concerned with his household
finances than the demands of his craft. The artist was merely trying to
please his buyers with this thoroughly meretricious work, of which the less said the
better:
It wasn't until his vigorous old age that Quance recovered some of his unique gifts. In
his final Virgin Mary the artist breathes new life into conventionally religious
subject matter. It is a painting that resolves all its antecedents - naivety, heartbreak,
cynicism, agnosticism - into an elegantly simple, almost formalist work whose clear
geometries look ahead to an age of near-total abstraction:
|
![[simpleton]](img/thesimp.gif)