Maureen Bloomfield: Truth is Beauty, Costa Vavagiakis reinvents the classical tradition.

Maureen Bloomfield

Truth is Beauty

Costa Vavagiakis reinvents the classical tradition.

Portraiture is like friendship in that it's not only capable of making absent people present but also of bringing those who have been dead for centuries back to life"--- so wrote Leon Battista Alberti in the 5th century. The portraits of Costa Vavagiakis have that kind of resonance, yet they stand apart from the renaissance tradition. The intent behind many portraits-now and in the past-is to convey a sense of presence, but also a sense of power. In contrast, this artist's subjects are stripped of any trappings of accomplishment or class. While the ancient Greek kouros represented ideal youth, Vavagiakis paintings and drawings, more in line with the Roman manner, show actual people, young and old. Revealed in their true state-with scars and wrinkles-they are beautiful without partaking of the artifice that's commonly associated with beauty. The peculiarities that distinguish them as individuals are recorded but neither emphasized nor covered up.

The figure inhabits the white panel as if it were a sculpture in a niche. The artist as close to the model as a writer is to a computer screen. The resultant illusion is vivid and palpable; the viewer has the sensation that he's not looking at a picture as much as encountering a person. "The space in a narrow relief," explains the artist. "If you think of Caravaggio's paintings-for example, The Calling of St. Mathew, the stage is narrow, with no escape." That the subject seems to come forward from the rectangle is the result of many, many layers of paint. Vavagiakis characterizes that layering process as "building a painting." While he's working, he's thinking optically, of course, but also of the tactile quality. I want the figure to be both naturalistic and sculptural." Accordingly, a viewer in front of a work will see a dense pigment load (paint built up). "I'm laying paint on top and then sculpting." Says Vavagiakis. "When the figures are finished, they're like effigies."

The models recur, sometimes in the same or in a similar pose. "I work with one person or several persons over the course of a year or years. It's an ongoing investigation," says Vavagiakis, "a dialogue between observer and observed, artist and model, person and person. Time is a prerequisite of my work; it intensifies the experience. Over time, the relationship between artist and model become symbiotic." Indeed, as in all relationships, there's a give-and-take. The artist gazes, and the model doesn't look away bit is active in gazing back.

Gazing back at the artist and viewer, these figures are vivid for another reason: They are larger than life. They seem to come forward from their spaces because the artist "scales up." "I'm more comfortable if they're slightly larger that life-size, so they're in front of the viewer a little bit," says Vavagiakis. Artists in the Renaissance used pinholes and pouncing to copy a drawing to another surface. Vavagiakis does many preparatory drawings in a smaller scale, chooses one, creates a grid on Mylar or Denril polymer, and then transfers the drawing to a big sheet of paper, which is mounted on a wood panel.

Light coming from the side in a studio can flatter the figure and also make it seem flat. Vavagiakis bathes his figures in light emanating from above; as a result they have a dimensionality, appearing volumetric. Top lighting also conveys a clinical effect, as if the subject were being examined by a doctor or interrogated by a law officer-in either case, exposed. "It's uncompromising," says Vavagiakis. "The top light illuminates all the bumps and blemishes; it doesn't hide anything."

Though he places a fully realized Figure against a white ground, he doesn't want the figure to appear flat and cut out. "With a white background, it's harder to get a sense of turn. It's a technical problem. I've learned to use ambient light, in addition to the overhead light, so the effect is more naturalistic. What characterizes the greatest figure painting is a sense of life, the illusion that these people are breathing. And what marks the greatest draftsmanship is the sensation that the figure is a form inhabiting space; there's a kinetic quality, a sense that the figure could move."

While he was fortunate to attend New York's High School of Art and Design during the years Ira Greenberg and Max Ginsburg were teaching before school life painting classes (requiring teachers and students to wake up at 4:30 each morning), Vavagiakis has, for the most part, taught himself. "Greenberg and Ginsburg gave me the nerve to say I'm going to do it on my own. Why? Because I live in New York City; I have the great galleries and museums. And that's what I did: I made my own curriculum."

On a typical painting day, he gets up before 6 a.m., sets up the palette and starts working on the painting by laying a fresh bed of paint. At 12 noon the model comes in, and she or he poses until 6 p.m. When the model leaves, Vavagiakis keeps painting from memory. "By this time the paint is closing slightly, getting harder and oxidizing. I mix a lot of paint, and then I throw out most of the paint I mixed. I tell all my students, "You're not wasting paint when you're mixing color. Think of your palette as your experimentation lab. Mixing is the key."

Vavagiakis experiments with different brands of oil paint in order to achieve different effects. He likes Old Holland for its density; Winsor & Newton for the viscosity in certain colors; Vasari and Williamsburg for earth colors and transparent glazes. He lays out his colors in a consistent way, arranged by value, and intensity, starting with the whites and the cadmiums.

He prefers filberts (like flats but with rounded corners), because they have length and more spring. Since the filberts taper at the end, they function "like a quill pen in the Renaissance; they give a more delicate, more varied stroke." He also uses the shorter and stiffer brights, which "have more body and therefore give you more control, and when they get old, they become great drawing brushes." Not surprisingly, the gold standard for Vavagiakis is the Winsor & Newton Series 7 kolinsky sable. He likes the miniature Series 7 because it has a shorter handle and hairs, so there's less spring. "When I'm painting over areas in layers, the layers get smoothed out. I don't want a mark to be left; I don't want the brushstroke to be visible." Instead of a painterly effect, Vavagiakis wants one more akin to the surface of bronze.

Encountering the bronze Charioteer of Delphi, when as a 6-year old he visited his ancestral homeland, was an epiphany. Almost 6 feet tall, the Charioteer is at once imposing and delicate, depicting an athlete humble in victory "I looked at the patina of the bronze," Vavagiakis says, "the cleanness of the pleats in the garment, the bronze eyelashes, the onyx eyes, the bronze wire for the eyelashes, the charioteer's reins that were broken off-it was like a fetish experience. I really had to be pried away. When I got back to New York City, I felt changed; I felt I'd been given something. It occurs to me that I was scrutinizing the Charioteer-and what am I doing now but scrutinizing my sitters, the people I paint, with that intense vigilance. What I am doing is trying to re-create that profound experience. It's walking that thin line or that edge-making an art that is immediate and yet could be a thousand years old".

Another powerful encounter occurred during a trip to Berlin, where Vavagiakis saw Rogier van der Weyden's Portrait of a Young Woman. "It's such a magical, powerful painting," says Vavagiakis. "Van Eyck is a giant, but I think I like van der Weyden better because of the emotive quality, his Gothic intensity. People look at the work of a classicist like Ingres and say the work is cold, but Ingres's work is just as emotional as (the romantic) Delacroix's. It's a different aesthetic. 'Classical' is tagged as being nonemotional, but if you look at an Ingres or even at a Mondrian, you can see the labor. Wasn't it Job who said you labor for what you love, and you love for what you labor?"

Certainly, the artist's own paintings develop slowly, over months and years. At any moment, he has several paintings in various stages of completion, plus hundreds of drawings and dozens of paintings in racks. The romantic outburst-the spontaneous gesture-may seem quicker, but it's not necessarily more impassioned than the slow process that unfolds in time. "The interesting thing when you consider the personalities of Ingres and Delacroix," says Vavagiakis, "is that Ingres was an emotional wreck. He was so overwrought that he had to play his violin to calm down enough to paint. Accordingly, I say to my students, "Don't be deceived by the modern idea that an artist has to be crazy or mad. Vincent van Gogh was obviously disorganized in his personal life, but her was at peace when he was at work. To make art, you have to be relaxed; you have to escape to a place of peace."

If Vavagiakis can compare Ingres to Delacroix, surely we can compare Vavagiakis to Lucian Freud. Both artists address the corporeality of flesh, but Freud celebrates life on its way to deliquescence. Vavagiakis, in contrast, presents his figures formally, with sure outlines that confirm the figures' autonomy. Their dignity in its own way is just as suggestive of death, however. While Freud reminds us that the body will decay, Vavagiakis reminds us of what survives. Art exists in a place but outside of place, in time-remembered because loved and thus, from memory, endlessly called forth.