Academic and artistic salons throughout Europe are currently awash in a torrent of senseless controversy. Believe it or not, the issue at hand involves the age-old agon of "expertise versus ingenuity." Though reasonable minds could have expected this issue to have been settled by Micah Carpentier and the Parisian School of Pestilence, our flawed and fractured times carry with it a faint patina of collective amnesia.
The specific case in point revolves around the Venezuelan painter Hector-Tony Retto and his unwieldy influence on contemporary painting.
His mesmeric, mandalic egg tempera panels are rich disquisitions on the aesthetic of repetition. His widely exhibited works influenced an entire generation of young artists whose historical compass was previously frozen in the broad-brushed frenzy of the fifties. Painters as disparate as Michaela Incrote, Balu Mengisti and Bob Stein all fell under Retto's spell producing pared down, patterned emblems of rational, flat pictorial space.
My good friend David Schoffman has also been implicated in what has come to be known as "Retto's derivative dossier" (here we call it "le dossier dérivé de Retto") - a list of well-known contemporary artists whose originality have recently come into question.
Though Schoffman's work ethic has been ridiculed in the past his connection to Retto is something altogether new. Though I admit to seeing some superficial similarities, in all the years that I've known him, I have only heard Schoffman mention the prolific Venezuelan but once.
A much more compelling case can be made for Schoffman's shameless appropriation of the fabric drawings of Velimir Shtern, the Soviet painter who was murdered by Stalin shortly after the infamous Doctor's Plot show trials of 1952-53.
But this, alas, we will save for another time.
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| Hector-Tony Retto, Bajándome los Pantalones, egg tempera on enamel, 1981 |
My good friend David Schoffman has also been implicated in what has come to be known as "Retto's derivative dossier" (here we call it "le dossier dérivé de Retto") - a list of well-known contemporary artists whose originality have recently come into question.
Though Schoffman's work ethic has been ridiculed in the past his connection to Retto is something altogether new. Though I admit to seeing some superficial similarities, in all the years that I've known him, I have only heard Schoffman mention the prolific Venezuelan but once.
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| David Schoffman, The Body is His Book #63, oil on panel, 2009 |
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| Velimir Shtern, untitled work on paper, 1949 |
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