William D. CANNON ART GALLERY

Victor Raphael - space Fields

JUST IMAGINE…

by Barbara Hitchcock

It must be autumn. The Ed Sullivan Show lights up TV screens in living rooms where families all over America gathered on Sunday nights. But in a back yard, lying in the fragrant grass, his hands pillowing his head, Victor Raphael stares into the crisp, clear midnight-blue sky. He spies a shooting star flash across the sky, but it extinguishes abruptly. The Milky Way sparkles before his eyes. Finding the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia or the Northern Cross is a piece of cake. He’s explored these Heavens from his earth-bound perspective many times before.

Victor Raphael’s childhood fascination with the Universe and its mysteries has never waned. Looking at his space field oeuvre, a lifetime in the making, one sees that his curiosity and excitement about the cosmos translates into Polaroid photographs that reflect his sense of wonder, yet reveal specific fragments of reality. Raphael made snapshots of planets, comets and nebula from NASA broadcasts on television. The images quickly appear on film much as the real celestial objects do as the sunset ushers in the night. But these luminous images were just starting points. Raphael transforms bursts of light captured on film with gold leaf and metal paints to give them brilliance, nuanced colors, and dimensionality. Specks of dust and gases take form as spots of gold, orange, magenta and silver paint, spiraling across the blackened firmament. Similarly, metallic hunks of meteorites hurl toward us, backlit by amorphous shapes of light. In these jewel-like photographs, we are able to share Raphael’s focused, telescopic view of space. The physical dimensions and Mylar surface of the Polaroid Spectra print has its merits, but it also has its boundaries, clearly defined by its white borders. To portray planets, moons and stars within a four-inch square demands one’s close attention. You must halt in your tracks and really look. The vastness of space then opens before your eyes.

Sometimes, however, the image displayed on the snapshot simply must be interpreted in grand dimensions. And Raphael, interested in new technologies, complies, creating his hand-embellished prints not only as outsized canvases, but also as digital prints on canvas and rag board. Complex explosions of inter-galactic particles scatter across five-foot wide canvases in rich, psychedelic colors and designs. Metal leaf isolates elements of this visual cacophony to help interpret the subject, to keep us grounded as these dramatic, large-scale photographs aim to transport us into uncharted territory.

With Victor Raphael at the helm, our travel into Space Fields is a magnificent adventure. We see close up what were once distant, unknowable constellations, specks of light and floating matter. We could reach out and touch 3-dimensional artifacts, rescued from oblivion, reconstituted with imagination and the stroke of a paintbrush to expand our horizons. Amidst these images, we sense the vastness of space and the power of imagination, nurtured in the darkness of night and the security of the backyard. A boy’s dreams are realized and we all are enriched for it.

Barbara Hitchcock Director, Cultural Affairs The Polaroid Collections Polaroid Corporation

December 14, 2004