Claudio Bravo (1936 - 2011)

Marlborough Gallery, New York

Paul Bowles, Francisco Calvo Serraller, and Edward J. Sullivan, Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings (1964/2004); New York, 2005, p. 421, illustrated in color; also illustrated in color on back cover

This work is in beautiful condition. The canvas is well stretched on its original stretcher. The painting does not appear to have been interfered with in any way, and it should be hung in its current state. (This condition report has been provided courtesy of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.)
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"What I really wanted to paint was the wrapping. I wanted to give a sense of trompe-l'oeil tactility. I'm constantly realistic."  Claudio Bravo

Claudio Bravo's exquisitely rendered Pale Surprises embodies a technical sophistication unrivaled in 20th-century Latin American painting. Synthesizing classical and post-modernist concerns ranging from the Spanish Baroque tradition to color-field and Minimalism, Bravo’s Packages exude a marvelous virtuosity. First executed in the 1960s—after a period characterized by highly referential society portraits that had established his early career—the Package series emanate an aura of mysticism that transcends mundane materials into a perfectly accomplished trompe-l'oeil reality.

Yet upon first impression, its subject could hardly be more familiar: wrapped packages suggesting canvases enveloped in paper and bound with string. “There was only one subject,” Bravo noted in an interview, “parcels, 2 x 1.5 meters, with a cross in the center of one or several strings. They were abstract paintings but perfectly realist: in the parcels you could touch the paper but the composition was completely abstract and the colors were taken from abstract painting.  There the subject of the abstract realist combination was definitely mature.”

Art historian Edward Sullivan has linked the package paintings to the 19th century tradition perfected by Peto, Haberle and Harnett. Here the viewer attempts to unveil the paper wrapping as though there were some more fully realized picture beneath it: the hidden subject within the painting. “We must use our imagination with an even greater inventiveness to conjure the image beneath the thick…paper, tied with a cord,” observes Sullivan. (1)  Of course the unavoidable suspicion that the wrapped parcel represents an enveloped canvas toys with this tendency in the observer, teasing us with the possibility of reconciling pure representation with evident abstraction.

Bravo candidly noted that his inspiration for the series lay in the abstract paintings of Tàpies and Rothko. “I think that I was originally inspired to do these pictures after looking at some works by Antoni Tàpies, whom I greatly admired.  He’d done paintings with string that resembled wrapped objects.  Rothko’s work was also instrumental, but in a more indirect way.” (2) Contemporary critics have also noted formal affinities to the color field paintings of Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly. Yet even acknowledging these non-figurative origins, it is the inside of the package what holds our attention. Is this the true subject of the composition, a finished painting wrapped for delivery? Or are these two large canvases arriving at Bravo’s studio for future completion?

The elegance of Bravo's draftsmanship achieves splendid expression in Pale Surprises. Here subject, form, and palette fuse. Gracefully rendered in an indescribable palette of blues and creams, Pale Surprises suggests an otherworldly reality. Bravo acknowledges as much. “These…paintings transcend reality. I use light a bit like Zurburán did. He was one of the few painters that gave true transcendent meanings to objects. This treatment…makes things seem more than they are…their essence is greater.”

1. Edward J. Sullivan, Claudio Bravo, New York, 1995, p. 62
2. Ibid, p. 36.