Cars and People
Matthew Bourbon
Robert Bechtle is a painter of mundane situations. He frequently portrays solitary automobiles or people striking poses next to San Francisco homes. Looking at the spread of his work in a retrospective in Fort Worth, it’s clear that Bechtle’s paintings from the 1970s, of friends and family in backyards and indoor sitting rooms, are some of his best. His portraits of parked cars, however, are simply more unusual. Stationed in front of houses and storefronts, the cars loom in our mind as portentous emblems. They act as inanimate protagonists and symbolic carriers of place, time and personality.
Bechtle’s skill at enticing us to pay attention to such ordinary parts of our lives is a stunning accomplishment. We are open to his paintings in part because the images are not exaltations of our American fixation with the automobile. There is no machismo here. Nor is there the spectacle of the fetishized car culture of southern California. Bechtle’s seemingly prosaic subject matter belies a deep involvement with the drama of light and verisimilitude. He seems primarily interested in the means by which character is unveiled within the familiarity of suburban existence. Bechtle’s approach to addressing the sometimes numbing effect of suburban unanimity is captivating because he is not engaged in some flippant critique of bourgeois taste. He is never didactic or ham-fisted, but instead finds complexity through his love of his subjects, which are mostly images drawn from his immediate life.
In fact, Bechtle’s methodical paintings seem to invest all their worth in an almost journalistic description of his surroundings. This focus on minute detail and the painstakingly slow registration of reflected light and color could easily have a deadening effect, creating a hermetic dullness that is the knell to many a photorealist painting. Mostly, Bechtle avoids this trap and succeeds in making paintings that are not paint by numbers, but rather much more than the sum of their technique. In one of his strongest works, Alameda Gran Torino, there’s a magnificent attention to subtle tonal gradations in the sickly greens of a station wagon and a garage door. But observing the details of the painting one also sees a free hand changing the texture of the paint application from a variegated wood paneling to the brushy white glare shimmering off of a chrome bumper. For an artist associated with the restraint of the Photorealists, Bechtle is a surprisingly painterly painter. The physical differences in his work suggest an investment in the perceptual, as well as the visceral, impact of painting. Granted, Bechtle is no bravura mark maker, but he does use mark making to build a tactile language within his paintings that lets the paint have a value of its own, outside of its ability to approximate our visual world.
While it’s true that Bechtle’s earliest work is often dryly painted and that his latest efforts suffer from an unfortunate impressionistic stippling, his fecund mid-1970s marks the top of his game. With these works, Bechtle paints with a laser-like attention to surface tensions and structural geometry. In discussing his work as a whole, people often speak of the importance of the photograph, or they mention similarities to Edward Hopper. Photography certainly does reveal itself, via snapshot stances and color-blurred edges; but Bechtle seems to use the photograph not as an end, but as a tool to find unusual detail in what we regularly ignore in our ordinary lives. As for the Hopper comparisons, Bechtle feels more like Piero Della Francesca, in that his aims seem geared less toward emotive storytelling, and more toward a thoughtful attention to the organization of aesthetic relationships and to a slowly constructed kind of painting that aligns him with pre-modern art.
Take for instance, Bechtle?s most famous work, 61 Pontiac. In this painting one sees a family, stock-still, in front of the aforementioned car. The subject of this work could easily bore us with its familiarity. Instead it elevates the subject of the family portrait, while candidly presenting a common slice of life. There is something hopeful, touching and even sentimental underneath Bechtle’s measured painting. In this work, and in many others, we register the clich� of American suburban existence, but such notions fall away under the clarity and resilience of Bechtle’s acute vision.
