“My basic decision was, ‘Maybe painting is dead, but there’s still beauty. And of the things of beauty, I’ll choose those in our everyday lives to portray. I’ll paint things we take for granted and often overlook.’”
B right lights, pinball targets, and colorful decorations dazzle upon the canvas in Charles Bell’s Viking Strikes from 1987. The present work is suffused with the sights and sounds of an arcade, the pinball machine’s disparate elements glowing and singing with anticipation of being struck by the pinball. The polished metal pinball at the right of the composition reflets the expanse of the scene—from the female figure in the foreground to the dimly lit atmosphere of the arcade. Beckoning the viewer to question the warping edges of reality, between presence and reflection, between photograph and painting, Viking Strikes stands as an undeniable exemplar of Bell’s singular visual lexicon. Test.mes nt to the significance of Bell’s celebrated oeuvre, his paintings can be found in the collects ion of prestigious institutional collects ions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid.
Despite Charles Bell's deep-seated interest in the arts fostered from a young age, his first serious pursuit of a career in painting began in the 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area following his tour in the U.S. Navy. Working under the painter Donald Timothy Flores on landscape and still life paintings, Bell fostered his trompe l’oeil technique. Through interactions with contemporaries such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud, Bell also harnessed a distinct sensibility for vibrant colors and quotidian subject matter.
Shortly after relocating to New York City in 1969, the artist began exhibiting at the Greenwich Gallery and the Louis K. Meisel Gallery, while also further refining his singular visual lexicon that would later come to take center stage in the movement of Photorealism. The city also offered him other formative experiences that shaped his practice—at the Frick collects ion, he encountered the work of Johannes Vermeer firsthand, and at the New York Public Library he studied reproductions of Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and Salvador Dalí. These encounters inspired a body of work that married the commercial imagery of the 1970s with the techniques and compositional conventions of classical still life painting.
"My thesis is that the lens is the premier idiom in this century for communicating visually. The lens-eye view of the world (which is different from the way we see the world with our own binocular vision) pervades our everyday lives...So, if I’m trying to express this culture’s reality, I think it’s silly not to at least consider the peculiar way that a lens ‘sees,’ to at least understand the way the lens distorts our view of reality."
In 1976, Bell began painting his Pinball series, fantastic landscapes of bumpers, flippers, and lights of exquisite naturalism and glamour. Central to these paintings is the artist’s intellectually rigorous and technically masterful interrogation of the ways that photography in an image-saturated society influences the experience of looking. In its hyperrealistic precision and distorted scale, or its nearly mechanical exactitude and undeniably human presence, Viking Strikes achieves a heightened sense of reality, underscoring the stylized nature of photographed images that have come to dominate our visual experience. Harnessing the peculiarities of the telephoto lens, Bell thus presents a painting that, in its whimsical sense of joy and wonder, asks one of the most important questions about our shared visual language: “So in our culture, those things that are idiosyncratic to a lens impinge on our sense of reality, on what looks real to us. But of course, we know real is subjective, right?” (the artist quoted in: Henry Geldzahler, Charles Bell: The Complete Works 1970-1990, New York 1991, p. 21).