“What the surface of a painting can be is an obsession of mine...If you see how the plate paintings function, it’s very three-dimensional, both physically and spatially. I like dealing with physical problems and rudimentary concerns about trying to stick things to a surface.”
J ulian Schnabel’s monumental Rose Painting (Near Van Gogh's Grave) XIX is the artist’s prodigal return to the medium that established him in the artworld, belonging to an esteemed series of twenty-one plate paintings inspired by the roses that grow alongside Van Gogh’s grave in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. Composed of fragments of wood and broken plates painted over with rich hues of forest green and rose pink, the present work is richly textured. Fixed like puzzle pieces on a Cubist composition, Schnabel’s broken plates fill the pictorial space, creating an abstracted composition that is playful and dynamic, ultimately underscoring Schnabel’s creative power. In the present work, the elements of Schnabel’s artistic vocabulary are still as striking and relevant as when they were first seen by the contemporary art world over thirty years ago.
Schnabel first came across this unlikely composite source material in 1978 inside Park Güell, Barcelona while studying Gaudí’s spectacular mosaics and searching for a new way to paint. As expressed in Schnabel’s own words, “My interest, unlike Gaudi’s, was not in the patterning or the design of the glazed tiles, it was in the reflective property of white plates to disturb the picture plane. The disparity between reflectiveness of the plates and the paint were in disagreement with each other and the concept of mosaic, because they fractured its homogeneity.” As seen in this painting, Schnabel employs his trademark plates in a new fashion; by submerging the collage-mosaic in paint, the plates become merely the undergrowth and resign their identity as they become absorbed in the totality of nature. If Van Gogh’s final painting, Wheatfield with Crows, functioned as a suicide note, the present work is Schnabel’s elegiac ode to the post-Impressionist master, skillfully communicating a grand, homeric sense of pathos.
The work’s immense scale summons a dynamic sense of play and movement. Schnabel layers the broken pieces within the confines of the wood construction, allowing for organic cracks to emerge like fossils in the present work. Schnabel’s visually stimulating color palette utilizes a well-balanced mix of contrasts and muted tones. Utterly unique within the corpus of Schnabel’s Plate Paintings, Rose Painting (Near Van Gogh's Grave) XIX brilliantly illustrates his impressive grasp of artistic expression and material. Engulfing in its size, the work offers an example of Schnabel’s iconic artistic language in his mature career.
