La Callas L’Objet Trouvé

These Callas paintings are stills from concert videos available on YouTube, an upstart startup that has since permitted an unprecedented dissemination of videos of virtually all calibers and contents to anyone who seeks them.

In the 1950s, the artist Jasper Johns took similarly ubiquitous images such as STOP signs and the American flag and painted them onto canvas in simple but conceptually sound composition. The canvas was the flag which was the painting, giving a unique identity and psychological depth to the object. Like Duchamp with his objet trouvé, or readymades, this surprisingly simple concept gave reality to an impossible irony: these non-art objects were bereft of their primary function and instead were appreciated from an aesthetic perspective, thus claiming that art, which until then had been principally of retinal capacity, can enter the realm of ideas and thought.

Johns’ seminal work laid the foundation for the Pop Art movement, perhaps the greatest exponent of which is Andy Warhol. Unlike Johns, however, Warhol responded to his new media-crazed society by merely stating the facts, through an emotionally detached stance from his [literally] mechanically produced, iconographic silk screens. His oeuvre lucidly placed contemporary society in front of the mirror.

Today, that approach to society and art is passé: the shock value produced by television and the media has totally run its course, and [re]stating that it has desensitized the audience has itself become completely banal. The statement has already become the concept.

The Internet has given us a lot more of something: a choice. Information, that invaluable commodity of the modern era, has become a new kind of objet trouvé: one that carries an irony somewhere between Duchamp’s and Johns’ personal, arbitrary choices and Warhol’s detachment from his specific subjects. Only, this time, we can sound the information not just for external phenomena, but for evidence of an individual’s intrinsic motivations. The Callas videos are my personal searches, but I can’t have predicted choosing to incline towards this art form. As available information, the Callas videos are the readymades. As found objects, they obtain a personal meaning. As paintings, they are an insight into my own psychic struggle between the exhibitionist and the idealized poles.

In these paintings, I’m interested in releasing, through the process of portrayal, that psychic struggle; the tension between the diametrically opposed poles of the self. The simple compositional elements intend to underline the subconscious message. The psychological depth comes easily to me because I absorb Callas effortlessly. Her characterization is always complete, in depth, and elegantly within the bounds set forth by the composer: no unnecessarily long-held notes, no excessive gestures. She said whenever you don’t know what to do, just listen to the music because the composer has already seen through it. There’s an aria in Adriana Lecouvreur by Cilea, in which Adriana, a singer, sings to the crowd “Ecco…Io son l’umile ancella del Genio creator.” (I am the humble servant of the creative genius). Callas sang it like no other; perhaps she understood it best, serving both her principles and her respect for the composer. In the course of her artistic life, she damaged her voice, but the drama required it, and she never compromised her artistic integrity for the sake of safety or “pretty sound”.

I share the drive with any artist who would seek to appreciate truly the achievements of the Modernist giants, as Johns, Warhol and the like, while simultaneously engaging in contemporary society with relevant immediacy. I don’t think my work is revolutionary. I think it’s in the same vein outlined by those above and their contemporaries. While undoubtedly a product of my society (albeit I grew up in a very different one), I do my best and remain selfishly uncompromising.