Part 2
At the centre of Katz' s paintings is not the materialistic ecstasy of Pop Art, the static detection of things, but a movement of dematerialization and contours that decontextualizes the image and places it as the only protagonist of the plane. The idea of contouring will come back as a protagonist in the series of cut-outs, where the figures are cut out and supported by self-supporting structures. The background no longer exists. The figure is taken up in the calm of a daily gesture, continues the Italian critic: from the total plane of its existence to the artificial plane of art, where the selectivity of an attention that purifies space and time and bases the vision of a new image, physical and mental, the result of an intertwining of manual know-how and intense intellectualism.
There is no doubt that for Katz, painting is a mental thing. Even if the cultural references to seem different from those that guided the season of abstract expressionism. Many have indicated the consonance of his painting with the atmospheres of cool jazz. German art historian John Porter detailed the characteristics of the musical genre born in New York at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, echoing Herbert Helland's analysis: Emotionally controlled or indifferent, without moral commitment, witty, attentive, and focused on the essential.
And again: Refined, attractive, conceptual. All the qualities that describe Katz's painting well and in which he recognizes himself: It was jazz, a hot cold treated material. I prefer Stan Cette to Sartre, my stylization comes from Cette, not from those who have made excessive use of philosophy. And when the painting speaks of hot cold treated material, it is difficult not to think of Pierre dalla Francesca, to such an extent that it is precisely on the Sansepolcro painter that David Sylvestre, in a long interview recorded in 1997, makes a crack. Katz confirms his intuition: I was very attracted to Pierre in the early 1950s and in fact I did everything I could to get the Fulbright (Fulbright Schiller Fellowships in Fine Arts, nDa) and go to Italy to see his works. I love the baptism of the National Gallery of Canada.
The details in the background seem so new, as if someone had made them around eight. I like the choice of his characters. For Katz, Pierre manages to give his characters' gestures a static quality, a characteristic he also identifies in Jacques-Louis David's subjects, defined as extremely clear and very decisive. After all, he says, I am extremely aware of my efforts to make my actions clear. Take, for example, The Gray Court (1997): on a uniform dark green background stands the whole figure of ADa, Katz's wife and muse, wrapped in a grey coat. The woman is in profile and turns her head to the left looking at the viewer. The arm is bent at right angles and the hand seems to touch gently on the belly. The folds of the coat seem frozen not by the cold of New York, but by the still image of a VCR (we are in the 90s). Brown eyes. In the grey hair, white streaks. Gloss lipstick reflects a light that comes from somewhere. The figure occupies the left half of the table, the rest is a green void. ADa, a mature woman whose charm remains intact over time, almost like her husband's painting, shows herself knowing that she is observed by those outside the canvas. We don't know where it came from.
We don't know where she is and where she's going. What we see is only his icy image. What we have before us is difficult to evoke in us specific questions and, obviously, does not answer the few questions that arise in us. Oscar Wilde would probably call it a sphinx without riddles. The mistake you shouldn't make when looking at a Katz work is to believe that it's not just about painting. And this applies to both portraits and landscapes. The works are not about a particular person (significantly, Katz often refers to portraits as heads), nor do they represent a specific landscape of Maine (where, since 1954, he has had a second studio that he uses during the summer). It is as if the subject represented was only the way to access the painting and the bait to attract the spectator. It could be a beautiful girl, or something else, Katz said. What you think you're looking at may be one thing, but it keeps changing.
No interest in psychology or sociology, attention to detail is more a matter of taxonomic research and contemplation of beauty: I live in a city where elegance and beauty are values and that is why they become reasons for interest in my work. I believe that many people have difficulty accepting that these things elegance and beauty are art, that they want to see social messages, suffering, inner expressions, all things that do not interest me.
The artist focuses on the rendering of the precise gradation of the colour or texture of the hair or skin and, above all, on their relationship with light. And it is precisely on the rendering of light that David Sylvestre lives, complaining that there are not enough printed reproductions to render the grandeur of Katz' works. And it is the artist himself who claims the primacy of painting over the subject represented (In the end, the content is not important, it is the style that counts) and admits: I can think of nothing more exciting than the surface of things.
Perhaps it was this lack of interest in narrative content that saved Katz' s work from the shallows where so many 20th century figurative paintings ran aground that, years later, with extraordinary exceptions, seem so dated. The New York painter s career path has been oriented towards an increasing simplification of composition, which has been accompanied by an ever-increasing attention to pictorial rendering. The classic character of these images, their inclusion in the free zone that manages to combine figurative painting and conceptual art, brings the American artist closer to a painter who has won the hearts of the curators of painting and painting, and the minds of the priests of the avant-garde: Giorgio Miranda. Katz shares with him the universal dimension, the mystery, the distant metaphysical aura.
It is the elements of his art that, at low temperatures, slowed down the entropy of his talent that, in the long run, delayed the passage of time.