"Dramas on West Broadway" by Jens Brockmeier - December 30th, 2006
Dramas on West Broadway
The more paintings Ralph Turturro creates, the more one of the most dazzling qualities of his art becomes manifest: its variety. Not only is he impressively productive – there is an inexhaustible outpouring, an almost Picassoesque flow of new visions that carries along all kinds of things and thoughts and associations he finds on his way. No doubt, like the great Spaniard he is a finder, not a searcher. But what strikes me even more each time I see a new work: there are never two pictures alike. There is no replication. There may be variations of a theme, a set of figures, a color, a contrast, a format, a brushstroke, an atmosphere, a rhythm, a sound, a feeling, a tension – but no replications. Each work is a new piece, a new bewildering mark left on the world.
It makes sense to me that there is not, cannot be, one particular source of inspiration or influence. Everyone and everything I am in contact with influences me, Ralph says; “my kids, my students, the man on the street that is kind, that is mean. It all goes into the soup, into the process of forgetting everything when you begin and trusting that all that is real and true will be discovered as you work.” Philip Roth, in his latest novel Everyman, repeats a remark by Chuck Close that “amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work” – go to work, one might want to add, trusting that all that is real and true will be discovered as you work. I think Close’s line could also appear in one of Ralph Turturro’s paintings, possibly dissolved into almost unreadable scribbles.
Viewing these paintings one might want to imagine a number of them put together as to form a theater. The theater stages that man on the street, kind or mean, the kids and students, the people walking along West Broadway, all of them finding themselves suddenly in the midst of mysterious dramas. Theater needs its audience as they need it. This picture theater addresses them as actors, not passive receptors. It draws them into the play. Quite like Ralph himself when he, as he sometimes does, asks you when you are looking at one of his paintings. What do you think of it? Of that dark edge here, the scribble there, the outbreak of blue in that corner? Perhaps, if you say something, the answers are being transformed right away into new associations, new visuals, new speculations, fueling the flow.
Who says that speculations cannot turn words into colors, figures, and, say, mirrors, as they do with kids and people in the street? How would this work? Ask Paul Muldoon, the Irish poet, who writes that he uses “the word ‘speculation,’ by the way, with an eye to its far-flung roots in specula, ‘watch-tower,’ and speculum, ‘mirror.’” Or look at Ralph Turturro’s paintings.
December 30th, 2006 Jens Brockmeier
The more paintings Ralph Turturro creates, the more one of the most dazzling qualities of his art becomes manifest: its variety. Not only is he impressively productive – there is an inexhaustible outpouring, an almost Picassoesque flow of new visions that carries along all kinds of things and thoughts and associations he finds on his way. No doubt, like the great Spaniard he is a finder, not a searcher. But what strikes me even more each time I see a new work: there are never two pictures alike. There is no replication. There may be variations of a theme, a set of figures, a color, a contrast, a format, a brushstroke, an atmosphere, a rhythm, a sound, a feeling, a tension – but no replications. Each work is a new piece, a new bewildering mark left on the world.
It makes sense to me that there is not, cannot be, one particular source of inspiration or influence. Everyone and everything I am in contact with influences me, Ralph says; “my kids, my students, the man on the street that is kind, that is mean. It all goes into the soup, into the process of forgetting everything when you begin and trusting that all that is real and true will be discovered as you work.” Philip Roth, in his latest novel Everyman, repeats a remark by Chuck Close that “amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work” – go to work, one might want to add, trusting that all that is real and true will be discovered as you work. I think Close’s line could also appear in one of Ralph Turturro’s paintings, possibly dissolved into almost unreadable scribbles.
Viewing these paintings one might want to imagine a number of them put together as to form a theater. The theater stages that man on the street, kind or mean, the kids and students, the people walking along West Broadway, all of them finding themselves suddenly in the midst of mysterious dramas. Theater needs its audience as they need it. This picture theater addresses them as actors, not passive receptors. It draws them into the play. Quite like Ralph himself when he, as he sometimes does, asks you when you are looking at one of his paintings. What do you think of it? Of that dark edge here, the scribble there, the outbreak of blue in that corner? Perhaps, if you say something, the answers are being transformed right away into new associations, new visuals, new speculations, fueling the flow.
Who says that speculations cannot turn words into colors, figures, and, say, mirrors, as they do with kids and people in the street? How would this work? Ask Paul Muldoon, the Irish poet, who writes that he uses “the word ‘speculation,’ by the way, with an eye to its far-flung roots in specula, ‘watch-tower,’ and speculum, ‘mirror.’” Or look at Ralph Turturro’s paintings.
December 30th, 2006 Jens Brockmeier
posted by RTMac at 11:08 AM
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