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JAMES LOPARO: HISTORY OF THE PRESENT TENSE by William Zimmer James LoParo works in a very old and venerable tradition - fresco. But his concepts, the attitudes that drive the work, remind me of something even older. LoParo is a weaver, almost seamlessly meshing ideas from art history, metaphysics, philosophy and from his own life. At the same time he works by acknowledging both sides of contradictions and dichotomies. This results in a very solid painting; not only are the surfaces physically obdurate, but the integration of the various conceptual strands is very sound and stimulating. One of the techniques LoParo uses is precisely that used by the Renaissance Masters. 'Buon fresco' involves painting with raw pigments which have been suspended in lime, over a plaster layer. But the Renaissance masters sought surface perfection - cracks spelt ruin. LoParo's innovation, his obsession if you will, is excess - he repeats his process several times in each painting. After a layer is applied, drawn on and carved into, he covers it over with plaster. It is a rhythmical but cumulative process of proclaiming the self and then denying it. After building up several layers, as many as seven or eight. LoParo goes back into the painting and tears it down radically. But this isn't destruction; he fractures in order to reveal. One is easily reminded of Michelangelo's intention to free the figure from the block of marble. The satisfaction of seeing the evidence of many layers in an exposed fragment is on the order of the thrill geologists have when counting the layers of an upheaval in a landmass. I am reminded of Baudelaire, for whom the acme of painting occurred when the viewer was able to recapitulate its making. LoParo lets us do exactly that. It is pure and generous transparence. What generates LoParo's art is the over-reaching dichotomy of creation and destruction. At bottom this is not a neat formula, but essentially mystery. His work resonates with overtones of unsolved and perhaps unsolvable mysteries such as Stonehenge or the lines on the plain of Nazca in Peru. One can also read in the politics of our own time. A friend of LoParo's recently said that his work looked like the Berlin Wall on its way down. As ultimately unfathomable as all these things are, they are all heroic, the result of intense willfulness. Therefore, as potent as it is, the Italian Renaissance is only a part of his historical inspiration. A specific influence on LoParo has been the ruins of Mayan temples in the Yucatan. Pre-Columbian Indians un-abashedly carved into the surfaces of their buildings the vigorous way LoParo does. I can't help thinking that this year, when 500 years of the link between European Renaissance men and the Mayans is being commemorated, furnishes the perfect validation of LoParo's vision. He doesn't see the contributions from the Old and the New Worlds as being in combat; rather they exist in perfect harmony, a harmony that is all the more plausible for being embodied in a rough surface that is set up as a ground for contradiction. LoParo also cites contemporary art influences, which - as we are used to with this artist - are contradictory on the surface. He sees Mies van der Rohe's dictum "less is more" as an apt description of his work. As he reduces the painting, literally takes chunks out of it, he is endowing it with more and more meaning. In terms of actual influences on his style, he is indebted to Antoni Tapies and the Americans, Richard Diebenkorn and Cy Twombly. Diebenkorn might be seen as Twombly disciplined. The austere and complex angularity that Diebenkorn has become famous for , the visual symphonies he creates out of the elementary meetings and crossing of lines, is something much admired by LoParo. But in its initial stage the work is characterized by scribbling, the signature mode of Twombly. It should be stressed that LoParo's expressive scribbling is more random than Twombly's, but it is colorful, exuberant and often incorporates decipherable words, Reduced to a dictum, Twombly is youthful excess, occurring at the inception of a painting, while Diebenkorn is maturity and reason, evident at the culmination of a painting. This sense of growth takes us to what I think is the most profound aspect of LoParo's work; the elusive aspect of Time itself. LoParo evidently thinks much and in depth about absolute questions, an example being an early fresco with a composition incorporating most of the symbols for God in world religions. Time is something as inexorable as the Supreme Being. The two might be coterminious. Once again LoParo works with a contradiction; the most common view of time is that of a straight line hurtling forward. Another view, perhaps stated best in Ecclesiastes, is that time is a circle. LoParo's amalgamated concept is that time is a spiral constantly advancing. His painting acts as something of a receptacle, a time catcher. AS the conceptual spiral meets and enters LoParo's medium, it becomes embodied in that medium. Time shows itself in the repeated cycles of building up the surface and then effacing it, and the violent rearing up of what has been created are the evidence of the present-ness, the actuality of time. This is a dizzying, but beautiful concept. We behold the movement through the layers from exuberant scribbles to disciplined mark-making as a shorthand for the progress in everyone's life. Everyone's life is made permeable, just as memory is permeable. And the marking system that characterizes LoParo's final layer takes on deeper meaning; lines that tend horizontally signify time that passes; lines that intersect them interrupt that passing and stand for the possibility of eternity, an existence that is both higher and deeper than the passing time we commonly experience. A survey of LoParo's bas-refief paintings reveal that he organizes his surfaces in insistent networks of crossed lines, producing handsome and uncompromising compositions with a splendid basis. We are reminded that the Italian frescoes, as well as the Mayan limestone glyphs, were utilized to convey religious narratives. LoParo essentially does the same - within a Miesian framework of "universal space". But LoParo doesn't remain on these heights. He has down to earth qualities that lie at the root of his work and make it not only very personal but even poignant. I remarked to him that the surfaces of his work reminded me of music, in that his compositions are structured to emphasize intervals the way music does. He replied that he has often referred to his work as "eye music", asd that he spent most of his youth with a baritone horn. So this particular visual aspect is a carryover from a former life. If flying can be considered down to earth - LoParo is also a pilot. It is easy to envision a correspondence between the sometimes amorphous, sometimes patterned earth with its ravages seen from the air, and the appearance of a LoParo fresco. But LoParo discounts this as a visual influence, saying that he was making frescoes before he became a pilot. However, he says that what flying and making his art share is spatial awareness, fostered by a sure sense of touch and the high degree of patience and responsibility they both necessitate. One must admit that LoParo does more than paint; he commands a painting. But the most poignant slice of autobiography is that LoParo can say that he didn't find the fresco medium, it found him. He was born to it. His father and uncle were commercial plasterers who made immaculately functional and decorative surfaces. As an apprentice he learned how to work the surfaces to perfection, but his persistent attraction to contradiction has led him in his maturity to make art that deliberately undercuts perfection. Less perfection is more resonance, and one feels that James LoParo's way of working has a never-ending potential. William Zimmer |