Cidade nas Nuvens, San Francisco, Estados Unidos (Cloud City) - Wayne Thiebaud

 

Cidade nas Nuvens, San Francisco, Estados Unidos (Cloud City) - Wayne Thiebaud
San Francisco - Estados Unidos
Coleção privada
OST - 152x91 - 1993-1994

Wayne Thiebaud’s Cloud City from 1993-4 is a stunning example of the artists signature fusing of mimetic and fantastical representation, rendering a cityscape that echoes reality while exuding breathtaking, dreamlike qualities. Playing with the traditional conventions of landscape through vertiginous exaggeration, foreshortening and perspectival warping Thiebaud achieves the remarkable feat of imbuing sublimity into the mundane. In addition to the compositional ingenuity that characterize his landscapes, color and brushwork are essential to creating their visual depth and dimensionality. The billowing clouds dominating the sky are voluminous, yielded in a rich impasto which evokes his earlier, iconic confections of the 1960’s with their thick, seemingly whipped, painted layers.
The cityscape and its steep green mountainside are also rendered in a classic Thiebaud palette of sunny yellows and oranges, contrasted with cooler, nuanced shades of purple, blue and grey. Employing a technique now referred to as ‘halation’ within color theory, Thiebaud juxtaposes warm and cool tones to produce a resounding prismatic synergy that contours and electrifies each form off the surface of the canvas.
Of his aims in the genre of landscape painting Thiebaud has said, “I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape—see a pretty place and try to paint it—but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into'" (Karen Tsujimoto, Wayne Thiebaud, Seattle, 1985, p. 25). His masterful manipulation of space, married to a whimsical inventiveness, is displayed in its fullness in Cloud City. His works evoke a specificity of place but utterly resist mundanity, instead they swirl, seemingly alive with magic. The compositional brilliance of Cloud City lays in its perfect balance and exceptional rendering of manmade elements (skyscrapers and paved streets) situated against a divine background of sky filled with two, heavenly, billowing clouds.
This separation between the celestial and metropolitan components of the work are divided on a diagonal bias which delineates the bottom third of the painting and contrasts with the strong verticality of the buildings lining the street and left side of the composition. Thiebaud translates the ineffable experience of visual perception, capturing a moment that feels both utterly real and impossible, drawing on the principals of Abstract expressionism, he lands on a scene that is gloriously, characteristically picturesque and simultaneously completely surreal. Awe inspiring in composition and dazzling it its array of celestial colors Cloud City is a triumph of Thiebaud’s formal exploration of the urban landscape.
Describing the impetus behind this body of work, the artist commented: "I was fascinated...by the way that different streets came in and out and then just vanished. So, I sat out on a street corner and began to paint them." (Wayne Thiebaud quoted in: Exh Cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (and traveling), Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, 2000, p. 58). Both archetypal of San Francisco and utterly fantastical Cloud City creates a layered dialogue between realism and abstraction that emphasizes the bewitching complexities of one of America's most prominent and celebrated artists.
This work encapsulates the imaginative psyche of Thiebaud, speaking to his continual quest to expand the genre and continual formal innovations through his realistic subject matter in 1968 the artist stated, “I think we have barely touched upon the real capacity of what realistic painting can do” (W. Thiebaud, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2000, p. 48). Executed nearly 25 years after that statement Cloud City resoundingly testifies to Thiebaud’s devotion to this belief and mastery of the genre.