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拍品专文
Dating from 1988, Roy Lichtenstein's Reflections: Untitled presents the viewer with a picture-in-a-picture, a format that allows the artist to investigate the entire nature of painting itself. Reflections: Untitled shows what appears to be one of Lichtenstein's own cartoon-like Seascapes from the height of the Pop Art period in the 1960s. Yet across that picture and its yellow mount are the vivid streaks of the reflections of the title. One is made with metallic paint, used again in the fictitious frame that Lichtenstein has himself painted; another is filled with a flat flesh tone, while yet others feature abstract patterns, dots and grids. In Reflections: Untitled, then, Lichtenstein has called upon a vast arsenal of devices and themes from throughout his artistic career, playfully quoting his own earlier works and added layers of extra meaning that also serve as further removals from the theme itself.
Lichtenstein's works had long probed the nature of painting and of seeing, especially in the age of commercial art in which the viewer is trained to interpret abstract forms as images, and those images as ideals. In the seascape in the background of Reflections: Untitled, for instance, Lichtenstein has managed to convey the sense of the rippling water through the use of wavy horizontal striations running through the white-dotted dark blue of the surface of the sea. Similarly, the clouds in the sky are presented through the playful use of an omission: a white area perfectly evokes their billowing nature. Lichtenstein has played with the visual language of commercial art in his depiction of the 'reflections' of the title. These are reprisals of the Mirror theme that Lichtenstein had first explored in 1969 and put his Benday dots to new use: by painting dots in a gradated density and a white background shown at an angle, Lichtenstein tricks the viewer into reading the matt surface of the picture as a gleaming sheet of glass. Indeed, the flesh-coloured area may be intended to hint at the distorted reflection of the viewer's own face while the rest, the Mondrian- and Vasarely-like elements, may depict the room.
In Reflections: Untitled, Lichtenstein has added another complicating factor in the form of the metallic paint that he has used, which allows him to incorporate a genuinely reflective element within the surface of his picture. Lichtenstein's pictures dismantle and reconfigure the building blocks of commercial art, a form of short-hand that the Western viewer cannot help but interpret, in order to throw into question the entire way that we see the world through flat images, highlighting the gulf between reality and representation. Reflections: Untitled emphasises its own artifice, demanding that the viewer see it for the two-dimensional, flat object that it is. As he explained, 'My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected colour areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world' (Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Coward (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Madrid, 2007, p. 52). At the same time, Lichtenstein revels in the sleight-of-hand that allows him nonetheless to force the viewer, as though by reflex, to 'read' his image.
Lichtenstein's works had long probed the nature of painting and of seeing, especially in the age of commercial art in which the viewer is trained to interpret abstract forms as images, and those images as ideals. In the seascape in the background of Reflections: Untitled, for instance, Lichtenstein has managed to convey the sense of the rippling water through the use of wavy horizontal striations running through the white-dotted dark blue of the surface of the sea. Similarly, the clouds in the sky are presented through the playful use of an omission: a white area perfectly evokes their billowing nature. Lichtenstein has played with the visual language of commercial art in his depiction of the 'reflections' of the title. These are reprisals of the Mirror theme that Lichtenstein had first explored in 1969 and put his Benday dots to new use: by painting dots in a gradated density and a white background shown at an angle, Lichtenstein tricks the viewer into reading the matt surface of the picture as a gleaming sheet of glass. Indeed, the flesh-coloured area may be intended to hint at the distorted reflection of the viewer's own face while the rest, the Mondrian- and Vasarely-like elements, may depict the room.
In Reflections: Untitled, Lichtenstein has added another complicating factor in the form of the metallic paint that he has used, which allows him to incorporate a genuinely reflective element within the surface of his picture. Lichtenstein's pictures dismantle and reconfigure the building blocks of commercial art, a form of short-hand that the Western viewer cannot help but interpret, in order to throw into question the entire way that we see the world through flat images, highlighting the gulf between reality and representation. Reflections: Untitled emphasises its own artifice, demanding that the viewer see it for the two-dimensional, flat object that it is. As he explained, 'My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected colour areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world' (Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Coward (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Madrid, 2007, p. 52). At the same time, Lichtenstein revels in the sleight-of-hand that allows him nonetheless to force the viewer, as though by reflex, to 'read' his image.