The Cool Eye

An art style that came to prominence in the early 1970s, Super Realism often appeals to those for whom a faithful depiction of the external world represents the artist's 'proper' purpose. Perhaps as much for this as for any other reason, Super Realism has always presented a particular problem to those who regard it as a belated attempt to undo the achievements of twentieth-century abstraction.

Essentially an American development and one that, to a lesser extent, was taken up in Britain and elsewhere, Super Realism deliberately rejected the prevailing avant-garde style of Minimal and Conceptual abstraction, in which artists' ideas — rather than their actual realization — were of primary concern. Artists working in the Super-Realist manner sought to create images that were highly representational; indeed, so extreme was their representationalism that the term 'Super Realist' appropriately came to be applied to those images which appeared to project an unnaturally heightened reality. Other labels have also been used to define this effect, including 'Photo Realist' and 'Hyper Realist', and while there have been attempts to make distinctions between the different usages, to all intents and purposes they describe the one style.

While the leading exponents of Super Realism have all attained recognition as painters, it is less well known that they also pushed their aesthetic in printmaking, where some of their most extraordinary achievements have been made. The American Super Realists Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle and Chuck Close take the same meticulous, almost obsessive, approach to their printmaking as they do to their canvases. Celebrated for his depiction of deserted city shop-fronts and plate-glass office facades, Richard Estes is reputed to have used fifty or more handcut stencils for each screenprint in his Urban landscape series. Although a colour slide usually provides Estes with his starting point, the composition is elaborated with considerable rearrangement of the details as the artist seeks to impose proportion and harmony upon his subject. Beneath the rich play of surfaces in Estes 's screenprints — the cut-off lettering of shop signs, the warping reflections of plate glass, or the floating effects of fluorescent office lighting — there lies a highly ordered structure that is reminiscent of geometric abstraction.

The Californian Robert Bechtle takes an ordinary snapshot of a specific place, such as an empty neighbourhood street, and proceeds to transform it into an expression of the desolate uniformity often encountered in middle-class suburbia. In his soft-ground etching Sunset street, Bechtle heightens the effect of suburban blandness by his use of quiet, pastel colours.

For Chuck Close, technique has always presented its own particular appeal. Challenged by the idea of making a giant mezzotint based on a simple snapshot of his friend Keith, Close photo-etched the image onto an outsize copper plate, and then divided the plate into little squares. Each square of the grid was progressively worked upon by the artist, who, by laboriously burnishing back the photo-etched plate, achieved the highlights he was seeking. When the plate was inked, the areas pitted by the photo-etching process held sufficient ink to print the rich velvety black that is characteristic of mezzotint. The paler, uneven areas around the mouth in Keith/mezzotint were partly accidental, for the artist pulled so many proofs of this section while making the early states of the image that the plate wore down. Close makes the viewer aware of how the single eye of the close-up lens — through cropping, selective focus and shallow depth of field — imposes its own construction upon the image. For Close, copying the photographic image of the sitter rather than the sitter becomes the subject of his art; accordingly, he is concerned less with the binocular vision of the human eye than with the one-eyed focus of the camera.

In this respect, Close differs from Philip Pearlstein — another American — who disdains the use of the camera, preferring instead to work by the traditional method of making careful life drawings from the model in the studio. And while Close chooses to portray the head, Pearlstein has focused on the depiction of the body. Nevertheless, Pearlstein reveals a detachment from his subject which is similar to that of Close. The figures in Pearlstein's prints are de-personalized and de-eroticized; the artist renders the flesh tones of his nudes with the same dispassionate objectivity as the textures of the Persian rug or the couch upon which they recline.

Cool, unemotive and impassive, the prints of the Super Realists make no direct comment on their subjects, despite the immediacy of the imagery. While a photograph may often provide the initial inspiration for the image, Super-Realist printmaking is characterized by slow and painstaking artistic endeavour. By virtue of their intensified focus and their technical complexity, the prints of the Super Realists project an image that has really become abstracted from an external reality. For the Super Realists, the final image is no more important than the means of making it, whether that is through the slow build-up of paint on the canvas, the gradual overlaying of inks by screenprinting, or through the systematic working of the mezzotint plate.

Stephen Coppel