Tiepolo and the Rape of Europa

16 Longitudinal Compressions

of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s

‘The Rape of Europa’,

with White Black colour inversion.

July 2OO3

I Love Multiple images, they give an added gravity to a serious subject, Andy warhol’s Electric Chairs, for example. Like him I employ image enlargement, with its consequent feedback effects in print. More like me however are My Masters of OP Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, with whom I share a passion for parallel lines. These two thoughts came together when Art Critic & Curator Megakles Rogakos of Tate Modern, invited me to develop a picture on the theme of ‘The Rape of Europa’, for his own exhibition of the same name. A tall order perhaps, for a vehemently abstract Artist like my self, but these things have a habit of theming themselves.

My first broach of the subject was with some Old Master prints, and in particular, that by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo 1696 - 1770. I scanned it first it into Black and White and reformatted it vertically. I then began a series of Longitudinal Compressions, into ever thinner ‘Bars’, with the image deforming vertically. I laid these out on a page, four at quarter widths, eight at eighth widths and finally with sixteen at sixteenth widths. By now the original image was obliterated into sixteen Identical black vertical smears in column boxes. The OP Artist in me won out and I opted for the latter. I had an interesting work but I felt I’d lost the spirit of the brief.

My approach to the requirements of this picture, namely that of the ‘Theme’, in abstracted, not to say Elemental terms of pure Shape, can only be one of sensibility, since I can not depict in the conventional sense. One sensibility of the myth Is that of struggle, which my parallel smears, gorgeously cool and minimal as they are, do not suggest. This then, was not the exact work I was looking for. The connection of this work as it stood with the brief is purely semantic, you only have my word for it, that this these bars are Tiepolo’s Rape of Europa and that is insufficient. I will keep it with its three predecessors as part of a wider set of works, formulated around this brief, as a future gallery on my CDRom, ‘Drowningcircle.rom’.

This piece, ‘The Rape of Europa’, will be a showcase work for me, I want it to be a tour de force, so it would have to be ‘sufficient’ to the sensibility of the brief. Elementalism, a syntactic mode of construction in pure shape, is sufficient to convey turmoil, restlessness or struggle. It comes down to one fact, the pre disposition of the brain to construct mental models of what it perceives and to find order therein. If presented with insufficient or contradictory information, the brain will vacillate between its conflicting models of what it thinks it can see, hence the optical illusion. OP Art plays on the assumption that the eye can be thus fooled. One form of optical illusion stems from the inherited notion of perspective. Like Tonality in music it is a guide to the senses, the position of a modulation in relation to its tonal centre, or the distance and distinction of an object in space to its observer. Polyperspectivity is the visual equivalent of Polytonality, music with multiple tonal centres. Constructions using Stars with an odd number of points, three, five, seven etc naturally cause sight lines to present multiple readings in conventional perspective. So when you try to take in the whole of such a presentation as this, it cannot be securely done, you will always vacillate to a contrary reading. This is both conflicting and unsettling, the sensibility of my brief.

A recent piece of mine satisfying those criteria is my ‘Midsummer Dance No.6’, shown in ‘Gallery 23’ here on the Disc. Just as an experiment I tried layering Transparencies of the ‘MSD 6’ and the Sixteen bar ‘Tiepolo’ study 4, the result was revelatory as a gray Black meld

I took Midsummer Dance 6 back to the Drafting table, it wasn’t quite up to the job, rethinking its notional solidity I created a specific version of the tracery MSD 6b, the ‘ROE - Zeus’ version. I put this back in the image producing and rejecting many degrees of opacity and gray scaling before settling on the image I am presenting now ‘Tiepolo and the Rape of Europa’ - July 2OO3.