[The following excerpt is taken from the fourteenth chapter of D H Laven’s historic work-in-progress 'The Story of Forgotten Art’. In the introduction to this pioneering work he writes: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this passage he looks at an unfortunate Spanish artist, whose great paintings quite literally never saw the light of day.]
Luck is no lady: it is the bastard child of the drooling she-monster and her incontinent husband; the festering cockroach under the cocktail cabinet; the hapless harbinger of despondency and doom. It may treat some people well, but many more are flung aside, like so many empty crisp packets hurtling along the dirty streets of modernity, pushed and pulled by the restless winds of change.
At the beginning of April in the year 1973, I was fortunate enough to find myself in New York, eager to witness the opening of an exhibition of work by the young Spanish painter Luis Reçagis. I had of course been aware of Reçagis for several years, but this was his first major exhibition – his so-called ‘breakthrough’. And I was just one amongst many who were extremely excited by the prospect. Previous work by Reçagis had promised much, but now – as an old lecturer of mine used to say (a little too often for his students’ liking) – ‘the time was as ripe as Aphrodite’s breasts’.
The title of Reçagis’ show was ‘Lights Out’ – ironic (or should I say apt?) when you consider that the exhibition pretty much signalled the end of the man’s artistic career, though through no real fault of his own. So what went wrong? Fate connived, conspired and plotted against the hapless Spaniard: with its help it took only forty-eight hours for his reputation to sink without a trace. But was it fate entirely? Of course not. I am far too logical an art historian to lean on the rickety walking stick of superstition. I will allow a pinch of fate, to be sure, but I will also concede that fate was assisted by various attitudes and aspects of the artist’s behaviour and by an indigestible slice of bad luck. Let me assure you, even so, that I am not accusing Reçagis of making any ‘errors’. Far from it: those very stances that may have led to his demise were yet an essential part of his project. Without them, he would not be half the artist that he was. And yet with them he has been forgotten.
The title of the show, as I said, was ‘Lights Out’, and it referred – quite literally – to the viewing experience. The exhibition was held in a windowless room without the luxury of electric lights; gallery goers offered pocket-sized torches to help guide them around the room. All of this was contrived by the artist in order that viewers might glean the best of his paintings. As the artist himself was fond of pointing out, before dedicating himself entirely to his painting, he had pursued an alternative career as a disc jockey for the marginally popular Spanish radio station Tango Sevilla. After five years of hard work he managed to get himself his own show on this station, the drawback being that he was given the unpopular two to five morning shift. Though he is said to have doubled his audience after a year, Reçagis soon discovered that the practice of sleeping during the day and working during the night was somewhat detrimental to the inherent structure of personal companionships. However, having given up this job, he then found it increasingly difficult to resort to his former habits. It had previously been his custom to work on his painting in the late morning/early afternoon, but now he found himself dozing at the easel at these times, feeling in the mood to work only in the middle of the night, when natural light was scarce to say the least. This provoked him to rethink both his painting methods and, more intriguingly, the methods of its reception.
The very first ‘torchlight’ painting was created in 1971. Reçagis enjoyed relating the tale of how he awoke one night from uneasy dreams and stumbled about his studio with a torch searching for a bottle of rum he had stowed away for such occasions. Unable to find the rum, he sat down beside his easel and began to paint what he supposed was a masterpiece in the gloomy torchlight. The sense of satisfaction that this creation gave him drew him into sleep. However, when he awoke in the daylight he discovered no masterpiece; merely a messy colourless canvas. At first, the artist dismissed his previous elation as the result of dreaminess, but that night he awoke again and sat down beside his easel, where he again discovered the masterful work he had produced twenty-four hours before. The next morning, in the light of the day, the painting lost its quality once again.
At this point, it occurred to him that the common procedure of exhibiting and viewing paintings contained fatal flaws. All too often the artist paints in one light and his audience view in another. Whilst this may not be incorrect as such, it is as a fact all too easily ignored. Admittedly you do not always want to see a painting in the light in which it was created. You paint a view of a garden whilst in that garden, you take it indoors – into a different light – and the change is not necessarily negative. However, as Reçagis was all too aware, there are circumstances in which perfectly good paintings are ruined by the quality of the light in which they are exhibited. Somewhere along the line it seems that someone has decided that paintings are at their best in well-lighted rooms. Reçagis made it his mission to turn this idea on its head. And so the ‘torchlight’ paintings were born.
A day before the ‘Light’s Out’ exhibition opened Reçagis was interviewed by his old radio station. For twenty minutes he spoke freely and intelligently about his artistic aspirations. The last question related to his place within the modernist tradition, requesting his opinion on the work of the by then elderly Spanish superman Pablo Picasso. In a typical gesture, Reçagis dismissed the importance of his predecessor, identifying Picasso as a ‘big wet fish’ and claiming that he would ‘rather pin a smelly bull’s corpse on his wall’ than any of Pablo’s ‘sick baby paintings’. These comments were not especially shocking: it was standard practice – if not a prerequisite – in those days for young Spanish artists to slam the aged Picasso, though it might be said that others were more subtle in their approach, giving much more room for misinterpretation. Nonetheless, there seemed to be nothing in these insults that might present anything of a danger to Reçagis’ reputation. Not unless he was particulary unlucky.
The exhibition opened early the next morning – April 8th. The press were there, as well as several high profile art collectors, all armed with torches. I was there also, though by the time I arrived things had already taken a turn for the worse. There is still some doubt over exactly what happened, but all the stories base themselves around the failure of several of the torches, leading to some sort of disagreement between one or two of the company, culminating in a chaotic punch-up, during which no less than seven people were badly injured. Others have claimed that there were several pick-pockets in action, taking advantage of the lack of light to go about their insalubrious thieving. Whatever the cause, pandemonium ensued. The exhibition was temporarily closed at midday; some members of the press already murmuring that the show was ‘impractical’ – though many others, it must be said, were at this point still in favour of Reçagis’ work. Unfortunately, worse was still to come.
Shortly after lunch, the news went around that Picasso had died. In this new context, Reçagis’ jokey anti-Picasso sentiments of the previous day were recast as malicious and insensitive. Those critics that had managed to escape from his exhibition with a positive opinion of his efforts now reconsidered the tone of their reviews, fearing that anything except a condemnation of Reçagis would reflect unkindly on them. As it went, few of them had to consider a review of Reçagis’ show at all, the papers choosing to devote the entirety of their arts pages to the late Picasso. And if the younger artist was mentioned, it was not without a reference to his radio interview (not to mention his fire-stoking reaction to the death: ‘I’m happy the old pig has gone’) and also to the controversy surrounding the opening of his exhibition. His nature of his work – which is of course the most important thing – was never described.
The rest of this sad story writes itself. It is safe to say that Reçagis never recovered from this double disaster. The art world is unforgiving. ‘Lights Out’ closed after only a day, giving way to another hasty Picasso memorial exhibition. Reçagis never managed to land another high profile exhibition and his project was continually ignored by critics both in Spain and abroad. I made several attempts to submit articles about him to art magazines in the 1980s, but there was little or no interest. In 1988 I personally financed a pamphlet on his work: it sold only three copies. My suspicions that there was a well organised conspiracy devoted to the destruction of Reçagis’ name are no less pronounced today than they were twenty five years ago. Even after his death (the artist passed away in 1994, having suffered from alcoholism for at least a decade) I have found it impossible to rustle up any interest in his work amongst a wide artistic community.
The most pithy examination of a Reçagis work may elucidate the reasons why I think he deserves more attention than he has ever received – attention which may now be ‘allowed’, his detractors having surely given up their callous battle, if not out of remorse, then because of an idle presumption that they have long since won it. However, the unfortunate fact is that Reçagis’ paintings, relying as they do on being seen under specific circumstances, profit little from academic interpretation alone. They need to be seen. At the moment, yet, this is hardly possible. Though a few paintings do exist, they are hard to come by. I know the exact whereabouts of only five works, most of which are of a lesser quality and none of which can be photographed in a way which gives the reader an exact sense of the experience of looking at them. Having said that, it would be crass of me not to at least give you the chance – which is why I do include within this article a black and white photograph of a painting by Reçagis, taken only a few weeks ago in a dark New York cellar with the help of a cheap torch (e.g in paradoxically perfect viewing conditions).
Detail from Head 15 X 15cm 1971 (?)
The work is known simply as ‘head’ and is thought to be a self-portrait, which is not beyond making sense. I seem to remember it being one of the first paintings you would have seen in the original exhibition, though I admit that the circumstances at the time make it hard for me to say for sure. In any case, it is certainly one of his stronger works, very well suited to the revolution in viewing with which he was involved. I have viewed it in the light of day and will happily admit that it did nothing for me under such conditions – in the same way, perhaps, that your daytime owl lacks the scholarly menace of his nighttime compatriot. I can state without fear of insulting the artist that by daylight the work is at best a lifeless mess. But when observed in a dark room by the light of a torch, conversely, the painting springs to life; all the unsubtle elements swept away by the encroaching yet never entirely threatening darkness. The very surface of the work takes on a new soul; the paint seeming to melt before your eyes like fudge on a hot summer’s day: the fluid and visceral vivacity of the painter’s style appearing to render its subject both sculpturally solid and limply yielding. This is, of course, accentuated by the precisely loose glare of the torch: the fading ring of light lending the painting an extra level of shading which works to great effect, especially when you are in control of the light source. You ought not to neglect that piece of information: when looking at Reçagis, it is always you – the viewer – who is in control of the direction of light – never the gallery managers, nor their myopically challenged designers, with their exhibition rule books and their obsession with ‘being able to see everything properly’. And what an advantage this proves to be: under such charming conditions a relatively crude painting such as the one above shines brighter than any work on which the light perennially shines.
As you are no doubt aware by now, the enlightening art of Luis Reçagis, so cruelly omitted from all the histories of twentieth century art, never fails to excite me. And yet, we must remember, his admirable ‘torchlight paintings’ ought not to be considered as the zenith of a limited yet radical artistic vision. In fact, it was always Reçagis’ intention to build a corpus of work based on the subversion of a range of viewing procedures. His experiment with darkened rooms was only the beginning of a much more wide-ranging project: a veritable and worthy assault on traditions of painting presentation, the like of which we have never seen before. And though we cannot be sure what he might have gone on to produce, it is now known for certain that he was working on the idea of ‘smell galleries’ – a concept which has since been taken up by a Elena Bezerovsky, a Russian artist who came across Reçagis shortly before his death. Bezerovsky intends to hold her first ‘smell exhibition’ – in which the gallery space will recreate the dung-influenced smell of the artist’s farm shed studio – early next year. Needless to say, she will be dedicating the show to the pioneer himself and hoping, like myself, that it might succeed in raising his reputation. She will be lucky if it does (for sadly her work is nowhere near as good as her hero’s – in fact it’s rather awful) but luck being a fickle sort of bitch, you never can say for sure.
D H LAVEN
