USC FISHER MUSEUM OF ART

TRAVELS AND WANDERINGS: VICTOR RAPHAEL

By Selma Reuben Holo, Director, USC Fisher Museum of Art

The exhibition Victor Raphael: Travels and Wanderings, 1979 - 2009 brings together more than one hundred and fifty works from the past thirty years of the artist’s career. It is a survey of his work that reveals the many sides of Victor Raphael’s artistic personality and his numerous means of artistic expression. Raphael’s travels and wanderings are at times real, literal, imagined and metaphorical. They range from an imaginative and poetic exploration of the cosmos and outer space to a physical exploration of new lands and cultural experiences. Raphael uses Polaroids, digital prints, unique digital worls with leaf, paintings, videos an interactive CD-ROM, and a site-specific installation to communicate the diversity and depth of his travels and wanderings. A prolific artist, Victor Raphael creates comprehensive series of works within a specific thematic series. He is interested in exploring the variations that are a result  of the creative process and in merging traditional and new media. Raphael’s art is all about connections and the interconnected relationship of all things. The exhibition Victor Raphael: Travels and Wanderings, 1979 - 2009 attempts to show that the ideas and premises embedded in Raphael’s various bodies of work are the threads of a single web, forming a coherent and profound artistic and personal vision.

TRAVELS AND WANDERINGS, featuring a large part of the oeuvre of Victor Raphael is an exhibition that I have wanted to present at the USC Fisher Museum of Art for a long long time. When I question myself as to why I am only doing it now, I frankly wonder at the delay. Nevertheless, the passage of time has allowed us to include Raphael’s more recent, increasingly compelling work. And so, I am very pleased that we are now properly honoring this important Los Angeles artist at this moment in his career.

Victor Raphael is an intriguing artist to those of us who are interested in complexity and contradictions. Somehow Raphael succeeds in being an artist at his very core, while always a devoted father and husband. He sees himself as a quintessential son of Los Angeles and an adventurous citizen of the world. Some of us know Victor’s work as a curator and filmmaker. Others are aware of his identity as a Sephardic Jew with enduring ties to Turkey, Greece and Spain. Where other artists would agonize when competing obligations surface, and might be troubled by the push and pull of multiple identities and their attendant responsibilities, Victor (and the people and institutions around him) truly flourishes in this context. In fact, it is probably these complications and contradictions that have given rise to the uniqueness of Victor’s art.

When Victor can actually hit the road, he does so—with brio. Whether he lands in Japan or Paris, Mexico, Turkey or Alaska the sights and sounds he encounters inspire striking and fresh imagery. He sees (or invents), as he always does, his personal relationship between truth and beauty, paradox and enigma, the micro and macro, and inevitably searches for the interconnectedness of all things. A Call to Prayer, a short video he made in Turkey, and included in this show, is one example of Victor’s creative response to previously unknown, but highly resonant places for him. But, and importantly, when Victor has not been free to leave Los Angeles, due to family responsibilities, he has traveled profoundly—if locally. Those travels and wanderings that have given us the title of his show are certainly about geography and distance. But, finally, they are always metaphors. To understand Victor Raphael’s art, one must see it as foundationally committed to exploration and discovery—wherever he might find himself. Out of such circumscriptions come Victor’s Getty Water series.  G. K. Chesterton once said that the value of travel is that it allows us to become strangers in our own land. The miracle of Victor Raphael’s art, the art that is inspired by his journeying only as far as the Getty Villa in Malibu, is that he permits us to see our own immediate world with the eyes of a stranger. He reveals what we would never quite register on our own, in our home town—because he sees freshly, records what he sees, and then effects an artistic transformation. Initially, Raphael accomplishes this by means of his tiny magical Polaroids, photographs based on the mosaics, the water, and the fountains. Later, after producing the Polaroids, he invites us even more deeply into this personal world by means of his large, intricately worked, luscious and precious gold paintings—gifting the viewer with patterns and colors that we would most assuredly never have possessed otherwise. We would have missed them because not only did Victor see them, but then, he transformed them. At the Getty Villa Victor also zeroed in on the sculpture of the ancient world. He focused his camera, for example, on a Roman ancestor bust in the galleries, then re-imagined and bejeweled it, recalling Shakespeare’s reminder that

“Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange... .” 

And, hauntingly, “those are the pearls that were his eyes.” This one little Polaroid with the now metallic eyes is a kind of memorial, an homage made by a contemporary artist looking hard at the work of another artist, long dead and anonymous, certainly forgotten. In a flash, Victor’s tiny altered Polaroid both space and time-traveled, bringing together two millennia of creativity.

  Victor is always traveling—through time or space and, certainly, he explores and journeys through art history too. Never a purist, Victor’s inspiration, and indeed his art, is hybrid by intention, combining ancient and modern sources, ancient and modern media. His influences are many: Man Ray, as photographer, painter, filmmaker; Jackson Pollock with his breakthrough into space and the seen-unseen; Monet, as painter of water (I am reminded of Leo Steinberg commenting that Monet saw the universe in a lily pond); Duchamp, as master of irony; the Surrealists, as the advocates of the unconscious as the primary matter for art; and, of course, Jasper Johns, with his mantra to take an object (and by extension a canvas) and to do something with it, and then do something else with it… . These and more influences from art history are essential activators to Victor’s aesthetic process. He implicitly asks us to accept the premise that his process, his materials, and his final products, are inseparable. With that dynamic in mind, it all came together, and the Polaroids begat the paintings, the paintings begat the Chromogenic prints, the Chromogenic prints begat the computer-based imagery and the videos. And, finally in a circular and non-linear way, they all begat each other.

  I hope that the Fisher Museum’s recognition of Victor Raphael’s art will open doors for our visitors so that they might know this artist more intimately, while also gaining a better sense of the breadth of his body of work. Ariadni Liokatis, Fisher’s curator, worked long and productively with Victor to create an exhibition that, while not being a retrospective, suggests both the span and the richness of this artist’s production. I extend my thanks to Ariadni, to the Fisher staff, to all of our lenders, and to USC for its enduring support of the arts. Finally, as always: my profound gratitude to the artist. We would not, Victor Raphael, see what we see without you.

 Selma Reuben Holo Director, USC Fisher Museum of Art