MY FRIENDS

is somewhat of a joke, the water gracefully
jostling the composer’s ear, as he sits
before a pond of swans in Hyde Park
and thinks on his acquaintance of several weeks
how often the perspiration glides so
skillfully down one’s neck! on the steps
to the subway, or waiting for a creamsicle

does he really know her? the concerti grossi
cascade into his lap, and the amber advent
of late afternoon curls through utmost maples
on its way to the palace of the late governor
whose smile is preserved in the wine glass
of water sitting on the mahogany settee
your friend bought one day while waiting
to call me up though I was listening to Franz
as purple irises peeked mischievously
from the pocket of a girl

which makes me wonder — who are my friends?
do they exist in a glass vase my mother
once bought in Vermont, or might I find them
in The New Collegiate Latin & English Dictionary?
(I certainly spend enough time with it) or perhaps
they were that little jar I found in the grass
with “Holy Land River Jordan Brand Musk Love”
inscribed Beardsleyesque on the label, or maybe
my friends have forgotten who I am, and I should
just start going up to people and saying, “Hey!
remember me?  You’re my friend,” as the light changes
and some poor Physics professor scurries across
the street, haunted by the vacuum of my visage

it’s not easy to talk about this, that’s why
my attention keeps drifting to the distant
composer, accompanied only by his own phrases
and the swans he would so like his music to be like
a Chopin nocturne is all in early evening
as light fades from the tops of buildings and the snow
is so vibrant and pale, so strange to be
nocturnal in a room, and suddenly surrounded
by a party of people dancing and removing various
articles of clothing, as the waltz descends, fiery

                               Vincent Katz

EVENING BLOSSOMS

‘Tis better to sink than to fink
Such moments of morning profundity unattended come

Here lie the remains of last night’s battle,
On my desk, stones, fruit trees and AESCHYLI
SEPTEM QUAE SUPERSUNT TRAGOEDIAS, how difficult
To survive in a blanket air, cluttered with
The sentiment of others, automobiles, and the fingers
Twinkling, curling about a drum stick, or curled
Around by a golden ring, sparkling in sapphire

That glowing stone, the fire of Sappho
Reclining in her Lesbian glade, o, to you,
Singer, and to delicate Horace, pacing his Sabine
Estate, I dedicate my heart this moment,
If it is mine to give, for the shadows
Of the supermarket and the reclining armchair
Press indissolubly at my sides, and up in the sky
The bird of destruction bares its pearly talons

Ancient harmony of those islands flows even unto
This present day, through electrical contrivance,
Into the voices of young women and men of Motown,
Their eyes filled with disparate visions of the old
World, and ours fixed on this street of age and dismay

“Why have you changed toward me?
You’re acting strange toward me”

But that fire cannot be ignored which flames up
In the evening, and by morning has spent its
Tender bloom, leaving the traveler bent from
Exhaustion, yet somehow elated beyond belief

Vincent Katz

Francesco’s Friends
by Vincent Katz

These paintings are not depictions.  A dimensional illusionism is quickly felt in the planes of faces, necks, and shadows, but noses often flatten into those planes.  The background colors are generally uniform.  Abstract patterns occur in facial shadows; garments provide regions for image-transformation.  Correct anatomy applies from head to body and arms, but sometimes arms are too small for the head size.  This kind of scale-rupture has been given the name Expressionism.  What is being expressed in these new portraits? 
Some have a hieratic quality familiar from earlier Clemente portraits: figures as icons.  The Eyes.  How do the paintings function as a series, or as individuals?  This particular series is of sophisticated people — intellectuals, mainly artists.  They are posed; we do not see them in action, nor with any of the accoutrements of their trades. Rather, all are looking out at the viewer (at the artist and then the viewer).  An interest in clothing is apparent, with contemporary styles accentuated (no evening dress, with one significant exception).  Here are real clothes. 
Francesco has painted portraits since his early days: watercolors, frescoes, oil on wood, pastels, and oil on linen.  He has often worked in series in the same medium and format.  Several years ago, he did a series of women and men in large, horizontal formats, many of them in evening dress.  Then, he did his fantastic Sopranos series for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which was on view at the Gallery Met in the Summer of 2008.  Those are imposing pictures of imposing women.  Each canvas is almost eight feet high and shows a singer in costume down to a little below the waist.  Francesco had painted divas before — one series was called “New York Muses,” another “Devi” — but this was the first time he systematically took on this pinnacle of Western art creation.
The current group of figures is in a smaller scale, more radically cropped.  They are dressed down, for casual, if social, encounters.  These external choices bolster a significant change in mood: these figures are more introspective, less guarded.  They are less on view.  If, in the horizontal portraits, we learned about social posturing, and in the Sopranos, we learned about women as performers, from these portraits, we feel we might learn something about these people as people.

Rene Ricard.  Poet, critic, friend.  The hands, one grasping the other.  The look in the eyes, accepting of life, but there is sadness there, beautiful green.  The mouth twisting to one side, recognition of life’s savageries.  The all-night theater.  The endless waiting.  The screams.  All subsumed into an image of ultimate urbanity: poet as Baudelairean flâneur, man-about-town, someone able to put it all in perspective, as a painter should, but a writer does it differently, quicker or slower.  He is well dressed; gridded shirt, earth colors, looped scarf or neck kerchief.  He is suave, collar and lapels swaying out with bravado from the shoulders, the head at a certain tilt that says, “I know this,” and “Okay, it is not all so great,” and “I fit into the ultimate frame.”

Father Pierre.  A significant, erect, visage.  This is a gentleman — or a man of the people — someone to be trusted.  His head tells us that, or projects that, erect on the stalk of its neck, eyes peering intently into ours, a look of beneficence.  It means not that you are happy, or that you know better than other people, but rather that you accept people and things as they are.  Abstraction takes place in the white-collar segment, brownish columns of cloth supporting it (as the neck-column supports the head, one continuous upright).  The painting contrives a way to mimetize the man.

Tom Levine.  The eyes are watering.  Is this man crying?  His head is turned slightly.  His nose expands to the right.  His hair is brushed elegantly out to the sides.  His forehead is a great dome of human existence.  He has delicate eyebrows.  His lips carry centuries of European suffering, and refinement.

Michael Stipe.  Rock and roll, but also a person in the room, with an equal interest in what they all are interested in: art, poetry, fashion, music, theater.  An esthete.  A sensualist.  His eyes, grey-blue, bright harbingers of his whole expression as a person.  The look is self-confident, awake, but not domineering.  How could one be, in this day and age? 

Donald Baechler.  Painter, friend, colleague in decades of painting war in this City.  Donald Baechler always wears shirts and jackets.  Here, he has taken off his jacket, is still wearing his shirt.  He is relaxed, so relaxed he may be dancing.  His right hand touches his left side; his left hand rises to push against the picture frame, away from his left ear.  The grey mottled background suggests a day of painting.  There are many dips and gullies in this portrait: beneath the eyes, at the base of the neck, in the back of the hand, below the wrist, at the sides of the face.  These are all beguiling, suggestive.  The darks and lights of a personality one knows well.

Self-Portrait (in Drag).  The intense redness of it.  As though it was all painted in red before the painter toned it down by slapping on a black mini-skirt, tight, feathery top and black bustier.  The red burns through the dark-haired wig and the skirt.  The face, too, is dark, framed by white beard and moustache.  This is not a head and shoulders, but rather the whole body, from the thighs up.  The curves are essential.  All portraiture is drag, and all self-portraiture.  Here, the artist who has done so many self-portraits re-invents himself.  He is not the introspective time and space traveler of yore, but rather the party-goer of this day and age — the person of indeterminate predilections, about to go out you don’t know where.

Nina Clemente.  She has an authoritative look, almost a sneer in her eyebrow arch and lips.  The hair is unusually painted.  At first, you read it as hair, because it comes from her head and falls down to her shoulders.  When you look more closely, however, you start to see it as shaped, snake-like, coils, painted brusquely with brown paint.  These shapes, which can also look like calligraphy, or writhing figures, are what fall down onto Nina’s bare shoulders.  She is more dressed up than the others, in a strapless gown, whose shapes also take on lives of their own, as shells or faces.  Like Stipe’s, Nina’s arms seem small for her body.  It is as though the painter wanted to see what she was capable of, what she could make, rather than making her a static figure.  Either way, she is goddess-like.

Tunga.  The expression works at the viewer; the twist of the mouth echoes the tilt of the eyes.  An authority accrues to people take who assume one name: Liza, Caetano, Bird. Tunga is in that category, a sculptor whose work is known around the world.  Here, in addition to his twist, his personality is signaled by the cigarette in his right hand.  The hand itself is dominant, resting on the bottom of the picture frame, its veins popping out like roots.  It is a serious hand, a hand of action.  Behind the hand, a white jacket: sign of purity, or a doctor’s careful precision.  Within the jacket, a dark grey shirt appears, open at the neck, allowing the painter to create one of those diving neck shapes of which he is so fond.   

Miquel Barceló.  Barceló is of Clemente’s ilk: a painter of large, expressive canvases, whose dark tonalities suggest an elemental quest.  Here, he looks, his lips pressed together.  The curl of his nostril is noticed.  His hair, like Nina’s, is clearly painting, and not the hair it at first seems.  It is grasslike, spiky and has an animal-like gesturality.  Symbolically, the painter raises a sea shell in his left hand.  This is the continuity of crustacean to mammal, and redolent too of hearing, complement to the artist’s vision.  Barceló’s bright green shirt and fiery jacket are evidence of Clemente’s own preoccupations with how color can be made to speak.

John Currin.  This is an unexpected view of the celebrated painter.  Where we might expect self-confidence to radiate, instead an uncertain, possibly sad visage looks out at us.  Its tentativity is signaled by the slight turn and tilt of the head.  Even the hands, joined at bottom right, are tentative, signaling dominance but also insecurity.  They do have the thick veins of creativity on their backs, however.  The blue-green shirt is opened at the neck to three buttons, allowing a large expanse of light flesh to appear in a down-pointing wedge. 

Scarlet Johansson.  Her eyes are enormous, but instead of mesmerizing, they are almost globe-like, like looking into two huge fish tanks.  They dominate utterly the mouth, which we remember so vividly from photographs.  The hair, too, is pulled back severely, not allowed to cascade.  Her arms fit her body, though the body may be slight for the head. 

How does Francesco make these works?  There are no studies.  The paint is thin, and edges are feathered.  What is being expressed is an idea of a painting — the format, the size, the particular colors — and also an idea of how to show someone.  The bottoms of the paintings are the places for meditation; the tops are for social confrontation.  One could examine the evolution of Francesco’s colors, from the earlier, paler, tones, to later experimentations with more vulgar fields.  His has always been a mischievous flirtation with past and present, with high and low culture, with formality and informality.  In these affecting portraits, he reaches deeper and catches his subjects’ more human aspects.