We know that the invention of the camera radically changed visual art forever. With a machine that could memorialise a scene’s exact likeness unimaginably quickly, realist painting and sculpture began to feel irrelevant. And accordingly, many artists shifted their focus away from painting reality and capturing emotions and impressions. But who says that you can’t do both? Meet Franz Gertsch, a photorealist painter and woodcut master.
His show at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum is the first comprehensive Scandinavian presentation and last exhibit that the artist worked on before his passing in 2022. Blow-Up! acts as something of a retrospective, in which we can appreciate the timeline and evolution of Gertsch’s work. In the exhibition, on view through November 10, we see some of his early pieces, pop art collages, which give us a taste of the Swiss-born artist’s painstaking method. The conversion of photograph to image “imbues his images with an air of mystery.” Yes, the work is extremely realistic, and one would have to take several steps forward to see that they’re actually not photos, but there’s something slightly different about them. Gertsch tweaks the colour palette to make it more saturated, or might wash the subjects in an entirely different tone of light, much like editing a photo in real life.
These changes are especially powerful in his portraits of women. In Irène, the bleached-blonde woman stares at us, unamused and certainly not impressed. Are her slightly overlined red lip, not quite blended contour, and smudgy eyeliner part of the original photo, or footnotes from the artist? Gertsch leaves us to decide. Her silver earring is blindingly bright, almost certainly embellished by the painter, and resembles a dagger or sword. She’s kickass and quintessentially 1980s. The portrait therefore encapsulates its subject’s outward appearance, but added details get at Irène’s essence.
In Medici, Gertsch similarly captures the vibe of a whole era—bell-bottom jeans, aviator sunglasses, and long, shaggy haircuts decisively put us in the ‘70s. The subjects smile exuberantly as they lean against a wooden barrier; the soft-focus and relaxed posture submerge us in the effortless cool of the era.
His woodcuts bear that same attention to detail, but are a bit more restrained. They’re carefully tempered and thoughtful, as the craft demands. The more rustic and yet powerful approach can also be seen in Gertsch’s later work; the ultramarine pigment is extracted from genuine crushed lapis lazuli. Once we step out of Blow-Up, we realise that the style and subject of the artist’s work may have changed over time, but his approach and artistic principles remained the same. The entire body of Gertsch’s work is a love letter to slow art—its ability to capture the true feeling behind a person, and communicate the artist's perception of the world.
