Hypertexture: Then & Now

Fabian Marcaccio, $ Structural Canvas Paintant, 2009. Pigmented ink on canvas, aluminum, oil paint, silicone, 91 x 81 x 81 cm. Courtesy of Ruth Benzacar, Galeria de Arte.

 

Hypertexture: Then & Now

By Lee Klein

 

Hypertexture, as a term applied to the plastic arts, can perhaps begin to be described as the ability of painterly and sculptural morphologies to possess the facility of the cyber realm’s facility to simulate them and to some extent, vice versa. Here, in concentrating upon the painterly dominion, however, we look to the power of visual works to translate this dialectic with an endpoint.  For argument’s sake let’s look at Fabian Marcaccio’s ‘Paintants’, whereby the artist’s literal measure is to show sculptural works of paint can take on hybrid forms, as if infused by power from their cyborg creator as they merge with computer prints and other technological elements and materials.

In an attempt to chart the criterion for the canon of this still emergent perceptual manifestation in the visual arts, let’s look to forerunners such as Jackson Pollock and David Reed.  Both of whom have made works where the movement of film and/or cinema enters the movement of the paint—or in the case of Frank Stella sculptures rendered in stainless steel, digital photos of rings of cigar smoke became a point of departure.

This writer, however, now realizes that his discourse was surely lacking in not citing one very important early example of where an attempt was made by an artist to translate the texture of another realm—that of the natural world into paint, the physical brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh.

Sure, this writer was trying to put a finger on this, but it was not until reading Roberta Smith’s review of the “Van Gogh Up Close” exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, wherein she indicated that the painter was indeed attempting to capture textures from the natural world in his brushstrokes, that he journeyed to view it at close range.

Indeed first in Grasses and Butterflies (1889) winds sweep into the texture of the brushstrokes; and the materiality mimics wind within. While in this work the textural cross references are perhaps suggested, in that it may take a Brancusian leap of space in the mind for the viewer to witness.  In another canvas, further into the exhibition, the conceit is much more obvious.  This latter canvas is Sous Bois (1887) translated Undergrowth, where sparkling pigments suggest areas of leaves which have collected, rain swept together into clumps. Here paint is sculpted up to affect the pallor of dew.

This is only by way of personally uncovering the phenomenon that this earlier painter began to tap into something, which is now so precious in the sphere of artifice, in engendering to remind us that we still occupy physical space.