LE MONDE: At the Venice Biennale, Jim Dine comes to “measure up” to the sumptuous Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfu
Its exhibition “The Dog on the Forge” presents, until July 21, works by the American artist, born in 1935.
View of the exhibition “The Dog in the Forge”, by Jim Dine, in the Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfu in Venice (Italy), as part of the Art Biennale, in April 2024. UGO CARMENI
BY Philippe Dagen (Venice (Italy), special correspondent) PUBLISHED on May 11, 2024 at 2:00 p.m.
The Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfu is one of these sumptuous Venetian palaces, admirably placed at the corner of the Grand Canal and that of San Trovaso. Exterior and interior adorned with marble and gardens, frescoed ceilings and monumental staircase. For Jim Dine to present his recent works there, at the Venice Biennale, seems, a priori, a strange idea. Dine, who was born in 1935 in Ohio, is famous for his powerfully colored compositions, in which, from the 1960s, he introduced objects – tools most often, the figure of Pinocchio, hearts or heads seen from the front treated with broad gestures.
The tone is set from the garden: tall bronze vases bristling with hammers, pincers and blades. The title of the exhibition, “Dog on the Forge”, is written in bronze letters on the handle of a twisted carpenter's hammer more than four meters long, also made of bronze. The question is therefore obvious: what are Dine and his works doing in this place which seems so unsuitable for them?
“Measure yourself against it ,” the artist first responds. When the paintings arrived from my studio, they appeared completely different to me: it was as if they belonged to the palazzo. I was very surprised. » It is the same for the visitor. On the ground floor, where the rooms have fairly low ceilings and bare walls, the small paintings of heads are perfectly at home; likewise the very large ones in the noble gallery, upstairs, where they get along well with the decorative elements and the allegorical frescoes.
Attachment to ancient arT
Jim Dine would like to remind you immediately: he has often stayed in Venice and has already exhibited there. But the main thing, for him, is his attachment to ancient art. “Of course, I am classified as pop art, because I used tools in my paintings. But, actually, I have nothing to do with pop culture. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, who were all a little older than me, looked for elements of their style there. They were from bourgeois families, and it was not the world of their childhood. Me, yes, because I was born in a working-class environment. When I arrived in New York, I was a young guy who looked at Matisse, Bonnard and Picasso, not Coca Cola. And when De Kooning said to me: “Dine, you're a real painter,” it made me feel good, because that's what I wanted to be. »
This will be, in the entire conversation, the artist's only allusion to pop art. It is much more important for him to explain how, six years ago, he spent the winter in Rome. He managed to obtain the possibility of using a church as a workshop. “It was a small church, nothing remarkable. But I had the key, and there were sculptures, and I like to draw sculpture. » Four of these drawings are here: a deposition of a cross, two female figures and a candlestick. These large charcoals were worked and reworked – “with the fingers, by rubbing” – in the church, then in his workshop in Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine). “I could still rework them. » It is the same with his paintings, which take a very long time to complete. “I always correct them, I correct them, I tend towards a perfection that I will naturally not achieve. »
The creation begins with a layer of transparent acrylic placed on the wooden support. He throws sea sand or workshop dust on it, lets it dry, then says: “As if I were jumping into cold water. » He makes a spot somewhere on the surface and the mental work begins. " Everything is possible. » Everything, and therefore to introduce objects or, now, copper serpentines which make curves and knots. Two explanations. The artistic: “These are lines in the air, drawing in space, dance. » The autobiographical: his grandfather, a plumber, used such tubes, whose brilliance fascinated him as a child. Technical details on the merits of lead and copper in plumbing follow.
View of the exhibition “Dog on the Forge”, by Jim Dine, in the Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfu in Venice (Italy), as part of the Art Biennale, in April 2024. UGO CARMENI
Influence of Bonnard
The genesis of small paintings is as long as that of large ones, “years, sometimes”. All suggest a face seen from the front, which shows through more or less clearly. So many self-portraits? He tried to avoid it, but, he notes ironically, his bald head and his eyes are still there. In front of one of these large heads, however, we evoke another subject: a representation of Christ. He starts by jumping, as if faced with an incongruity. Then admits that he once thought of the Shroud of Turin.
In this case, we continue, should we see in the hammers, pincers, saws and nails that he so often integrated into his painting and sculpture an allusion to the Arma Christi , a Latin and scholarly term which designates the instruments of the Passion of Christ, constantly present in the Christian iconography of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance? He hesitates.
This unexpected sentence follows: “As a child, Christianity terrified me. » He explains immediately. His ancestors were Jews from Poland and Lithuania, poor peasants who first settled in the south of the United States, in Georgia. But he was born in Ohio, after his parents moved from Georgia. “One day I asked my mother why. The answer was simple: because of the Ku Klux Klan. They were as racist against Jews as they were against blacks. When my great-grandmother died in Georgia, she was buried in the African American cemetery because she was Jewish. This is also the history of America. »
So he prefers to talk about painting again. As he cited Bonnard before, we come back to it. Art history generally states that Matisse's influence was significant in the United States and hardly cites Bonnard. “However, it was with him that I understood how to compose through color. And I'm definitely not alone. We were all watching Bonnard. I remember an exhibition fifty years ago at MoMA [in 1976] : a selection of modern paintings from private Swiss collections. The Bonnards that were there: a terrible shock. As powerful as the one I received here, in front of Titians. They made me understand what painting could be. » What he states in a formula difficult to translate without weakening it: “So fucking beautiful. » It applies to many of his paintings.
“Dog on the Forge.” Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfu, Sestiere Dorsoduro, Venice (Italy). Until July 21. Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., free entry. Dogontheforge.com
