Jerry Welman responds to works in the Prado
Art should engage the emotions, eliciting some kind of a response, whether good or bad. Say what you want about the Prado in Santa Fe exhibit in Cathedral Park, a selection of high-resolution photo replicas of masterworks from the museum in Madrid. While some might see the show as little more than an expensive advertisement for the Prado, it can, and did, take at least one artist in town outside of himself long enough to provide some inspiration for him to create a counterpoint, Prado Remix, on view at Ellsworth Gallery. Prado Remix, a show of drawings by Jerry Wellman, is not a counterpoint in the sense of being a contrasting argument but rather, as in music, it’s a complementary melody that is perhaps best viewed in conjunction with the outdoor exhibit in the park (up through October), which is close to the gallery.
“When I was walking through there, my initial reaction was that this is really absurd,” Wellman said of the Prado show. “Seeing those metal armatures and the sandbags — it’s like, what’s going on here?” The sandbags are used to weigh down the armatures that hold the images, which, for the most part, are reproduced to scale. “I knew they weren’t art pieces, but they are reminiscent of Cristo,” he said. “It’s in the public sphere, though, and part of my involvement as an artist is my interest in the public sphere.” Wellman is co-founder, with artist Matthew Chase-Daniel, of Axle Contemporary, the local mobile art gallery. “It’s what Axle has so much to do with, so I had to go down there and check it out. As you may know, the City Council had a long debate about this. A lot of people were upset about this. Is it art? Or is it reproduction? A lot of the reason for having it there is to increase our profile for tourism.”
Wellman was inspired to make a suite of pen-andink renderings in response to the outdoor exhibit, creating 90 or so of his own versions of the photo reproductions. The Wellmans that aren’t hanging on the gallery walls are available for viewing in a portfolio. “Certain of these paintings are iconic and everybody’s seen them,” he said. “But there were some I’d never seen before, and there were two in particular that just hit me.” One of the two was the Prado’s portrait of Charles III by the 18th-century Bohemian artist Anton Raphael Mengs. “When I saw that guy, I thought, he looks like such a goon, like he couldn’t hold down a job delivering pizza. I just really enjoyed seeing that.” The other work that wowed him was the portrait titled Amalia de Llano y Dotres, Condesa de
Vilches by the 19th-century Spanish painter Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz. Wellman was taken by her big eyes and what he called her dainty little hand. “I made her hand even daintier in my drawing,” he said. “When I saw those two images, they struck me. That, along with the iconic image of Las Meninas.” The latter is a beloved masterwork by Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). “I don’t know if you know this, but Picasso did 58 paintings while staring at
Las Meninas. Seeing what Picasso did with that one painting was so impressive to me.” So Prado Remix ,of course, has Wellman’s take on the Velázquez ( just one).
Wellman’s style captures the gist of the originals with a loose and economic use of line. An ink wash provides heavier contrasts of light and dark in some of the drawings. He also exaggerates the features of his subjects. He liked, for instance, how anthropomorphized the horse depicted in Peter Paul Rubens’ 1603 Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma was painted and sought to capture the horse’s somewhat flirty gaze in his own version.
Wellman spent long hours in Cathedral Park working on Prado Remix, but he was also curious about the visitors, listening to their reactions. “I would be sitting in the park and drawing, and I would hear the tourists coming by. There were some really odd and unexpected observations. People would say, ‘When I read the Bible, this is not how I saw it,’ or some kid would notice some detail that would be the last thing I would notice. This led me to something else — people came in there and thought the paintings were real.”
That led him to consider some ideas put forth by French social critic and philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) who wrote on the subject of simulacra, a copy or imitation of an original work that he thought could express some truth of its own. Wellman broke down Baudrillard’s definition into stages. “In the first stage, there’s a faithful image of a sign that reflects something profound,” Wellman said, reading from notes on Baudrillard that date to his college days. Speaking of the Prado reproductions, he said that “most of what’s there was done in that manner. In the second stage, it’s a distortion, or what he would call a perversion of reality,” he said. “In the third stage, there’s an absence of the reality. It’s not even in there. Then, in the fourth stage, it’s just pure simulation. So I was thinking, as I’m doing this, that I’m rescuing it from that third stage and throwing back to the first stage because it’s my Prado. It’s my expression.
I’m doing it. And I’m delivering it back to you.”