Claudio Bravo (B. 1936)

Acquired directly from the artist
Sale: Christie's, New York, Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture and Prints, May 18, 1994, lot 36, illustrated in color 
Acquired from the above

Although Claudio Bravo has inspired a generation of South American painters, his own artistic roots grew in the tradition of the Southern European Baroque.  In particular the subtle color effects of Velasquez and the almost mystical dynamism of Zurbaran impressed him deeply and continue to direct his work today. 

In the late 1960s Bravo began a series of paintings uniting his exquisite technique with an inexplicable, otherworldly aura of mysticism.  During the next half decade, he elaborated a series of transcendent works that announced his shift away from the baroque, highly referential society portraits that had established his early career, and toward the purer, sparer art that would characterize Bravo’s painting from this point forward.

The series was a revelation, uniting the artist’s exquisite technique with an inexplicable, otherworldly aura of mysticism.   Yet its subject could hardly be more simple: wrapped packages suggesting canvases enveloped in paper and bound with string.  “There was only one subject,” Bravo noted in a 1995 interview, “parcels, 2 x 1.5 meters, with a cross in the center of one or several strings.  They were abstract paintings but perfectly realist: in the parcels you could touch the paper but the composition was completely abstract and the colors were taken from abstract painting.  There the subject of the abstractrealist combination was definitely mature.”

It is tempting to speculate on a ‘hidden subject’ within the painting, conjuring an image beneath the surface of the wrapping paper.  In true trompe-l’oeil style (art historian Edward Sullivan has linked the package paintings to the 19th century tradition perfected by Peto, Haberle and Harnett), we find ourselves trying to look through the veil of the paper wrapping, as though there were some more fully realized picture beneath it.  “We must use our imagination with an even greater inventiveness to conjure the image beneath the thick…paper, tied with a cord,” observes Sullivan.1  Of course the unavoidable suspicion that the wrapped parcel represents an enveloped canvas toys with this tendency in the observer, teasing us with the possibility of reconciling pure representation with evident abstraction. 

Bravo claims his inspiration for the series lay in the abstract paintings of Tapies and Rothko.  “I think that I was originally inspired to do these pictures after looking at some works by Antoni Tapies, whom I greatly admired.  He’d done paintings with string that resembled wrapped objects.  Rothko’s work was also instrumental, but in a more indirect way.” 2  Critics have also noted affinities to the color field paintings of Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.  Yet even acknowledging these non-figurative origins, one almost perversely returns to the question, “What is inside that package?” A finished painting wrapped for delivery, suggesting that the true subject of the work is actually some other painting whose image is withheld from us? A virgin canvas ready for the artist--a painting that doesn’t exist yet but is nevertheless suggested by this simulacrum? In either case it is the paradox that matters--the implied denial of present reality even in the face of the physical object rendered in painstakingly realistic technique.  “I’m a realist, but I transform reality,” claims Bravo. 

Although acknowledged as a draftsman of the first order, Bravo has effaced all evidence of drawing from the finished work.  This further masking of his art intimates that the ‘finished’ product is not the endpoint or result of labor but an apparently sui generis event, existing simultaneously in all phases, all states, all potential.  Bravo’s friend, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, has written that, “For this reason to call his painting ‘realist’ or even worse, ‘hyper-realist,’ is as foolish as calling water solid or clouds ‘granite-like.”  Rather, it is “an essential denaturalization of the real world - one would have to call it ‘surrealist’ because in it the most recondite ghosts of the unconscious come, without us realizing, to alter the essence of the reality they pretend to reproduce.” 3

The elegance of Bravo's simple paradox—which hints at the artist's surrealist affinities—achieves splendid expression in White Package. Here subject, form, and palette fuse.  Rendered in that invisible color that encompasses all others, White Package suggests that everything is possible.  The point is not to exercise the imagination to conjure a concrete object behind the paper, but rather to allow it always to exist in that phase of becoming--incorruptible because unrealized.  Bravo acknowledges as much.  “These…paintings transcend reality.  I use light a bit like Zurburan did.  He was one of the few painters that gave true transcendent meanings to objects.  This treatment…makes things seem more than they are…their essence is greater.”

1. Edward J. Sullivan, Claudio Bravo. New York, Rizzoli International Publications, 1995, 62.
2. Ibid, 36.
3. Paul Bowles, Mario Vargas Llosa et al, Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings.  New York, Abbeville Press, 1997, 18.