CERCLE 6

He has recreated some of the most iconic prints of New York City: its ambience, its brightness and shadows, its chromatic nuances, within the framework of a beautifully limpid perspective and minimal interference with the photographs that he takes himself. This is a kind of reflection that calms haste, and invites you to savour the moment, the essence of a stolen instant, a changing tone, a sunflower. His complex plot starts out from dedicated prior work, during which the North American artist finely tones the reality he has captured by means of a conscientious creative process; altering perspectives and even shifting vanishing points to offer a reality, an everyday life, which is only everyday in appearance since, as he himself has confessed to us, what is painted is as relevant as the way of doing it. For the first time in Barcelona, he has just presented a magnificent collection of recent work at the Marlborough Gallery, where he carries out a questioning of reality and a careful process of tweaking using his skills. In spite of remaining a romantic in his brushwork, his realistic approach is both modern and honest: he resorts to an iconography that usually does not have much more to say. The fact is that he says it in another way, and his techni- cal skill in doing so provokes fascination in the viewer; something that could also be caused by that attractive feeling of emptiness, of rare sharpness, of a lack of figures: This pushes us to imbibe a landscape where everything remains focused; with nothing mitigated by the turbidity or inaccuracy of blurred tyranny of reality: there is where we find his mastery. He is not comfortable being called a photorealist be- cause, despite being based on the previous photograph- ic image, the latter is nothing more than a constituent element of an elaborate composition that is not limited to scrupulously imitating reality. Rather, it incorporates drawing and strategically distorts certain elements, bringing together various perspectives to achieve a kind of optical effect or illusion. His works enhance the natural play of light reflections on different surfaces, distorting, magnifying or even superimposing images, and so the final piece has a certain enigma about it, a confusion that invites us to ask what is real and what is fake. The artist has already had a retrospective at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid ten years ago, and on that occasion, the gallery director Guillermo Solana compared the American's work with that of Canaletto. Like the Venetian (and disregarding the obvious and manifest differences) in his day Estes opted to depict scenes and urban landscapes contemplated in perspective, with or without the presence of humans, which is a pictorial genre of the Venetian Settecento as vedutismo (from veduta, which means "sight"). Coinciding with his recent exhibition in Barcelona, Richard Estes has taken a walk through the Catalan capital over the last few days, camera in hand, to hunt for and capture a new pictorial project. Now his camera is digital, and it will, of course, not be the first work that the artist has done on the city. View of Barcelona, painted in 1986 offered a very personal view of the city from the Sagrada Familia, and is currently in a private collection. Reserved, affable and always very willing to collaborate, he has little interest in interpretations of his work. He confesses that he is not particularly interested in con- temporary art and that he does not want to enter into the game of criticism or comparisons, because all he wants is to paint and, of coursem to be able to continue doing so, you have to sell paintings. Naturally, in this area, the American artist has nothing at all to worry. █ born in 1932 in illinois (united states), richard estes is one of the greats of american photorealism. for sixty years, he has lived and worked in both new york and maine, and with as much skill as meticulous detail has depicted urban environments characterised by a use of refracted light, something that gives his canvases a shining, crystalline effect. although he has always had a weakness for manhattan as his favourite theme, many other cities, such as barcelona, paris, chicago or venice have also managed to capture his attention. RICHARD ESTES Chronicles of a particular reality Richard Estes Antartica IV. 2007 Cortesía/Courtesy Marlborough Gallery