💥✍Optimism sometimes looks desperate in times of crisis, especially in the now intensified proliferation of yesterday, today & 𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕝 𝕥𝕠𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕨. I came to artist Alex Katz in a roundabout way about 20 years ago: through images of his paintings in books; through an essay by Merlin James entitled 'Painting per se' (that doesn't discuss Katz's paintings just nods optimistically to their brilliance); & via an art tutor of mine who brought Katz up only to violently put him down - I was sold. Katz calls his paintings "up paintings". He is interested in optimism, colour imbued with light, surface, and most of all visual dominance. Art historians always lob him in with Warhol & Pop because he's going for instantaneousness like Warhol did, and like Warhol he is not interested in narrative, but is interested in Now - the present, the presentness & the prescience of painting. Katz has collected Vogue Magazine for years & uses the pictures to dress his cast of characters for the occasion of Now - right Now, in all its rightness and nowness. It's his whole philosophy (which is not a philosophy) on colour as light that gets me most. As a teenager I read one of those books that reveal the tricks of painting realistically with oil paint. The painter with the tricks was good - not putting mimesis before paint. But like all painters he had his rules. One such rule is to focus on painting light or colour, never both in one painting. So when you painted a vase smeared in impasto light, pure colour could only exist beside shadow. Light obliterated colour in his rulebook. Katz throws his rulebook out through his "reductive system" where detail gives way to fields of fast colour & s l o w drawing to ultimately become light. You don't get Katz secondhand in books or essays or via disgruntled painting tutors; you get him in the fleshy flesh, full & large, as I finally did at the Serpentine Gallery in 2016. Katz's paintings are all surface up close; the paint laid down without second-thoughts. 𝘗𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 - as Edwin Denby wrote - 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘴𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵🖤

APRIL 2, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night