Through 12/31 | Winston Wächter Fine Art | New York, NY

Tony Scherman: Pictures from Rome

Pictures from Rome is Tony Scherman’s tribute to the Eternal City.

Tony Scherman’s exhibition Pictures from Rome is not a picture postcard tour of the Eternal City. “I wanted to paint around Rome instead of zeroing in on one particular narrative,” he explains. “I wanted to put out an idea which didn’t really have a nucleus. The paintings in this show came to mind thinking about Rome. I grew up in the ’50s. The generation before had been about cowboys and Indians. In about 1960 the myths of Rome and Greece came in. I have had an interest and been a student of Roman history for decades.”Mark Antony, encaustic on canvas, 84 x 84"Among the pictures is a closely cropped monumental portrait of Marc Antony at 7-feet square. “Marc Antony was one of the great deficient males in history,” Scherman comments. “He had extraordinary, seething ambition. He was basically a gangster. His rise is clear and then he meets Cleopatra [at] the height of his arc. Then he descended.” Scherman depicts him covered in blood at the Battle of Philippi, a civil war in 42 BCE following the assassination of Julius Caesar. The forces of Mark Antony and Octavian (Caesar’s heir) fought against Brutus and Cassius, his assassins. Arcana Mundi, encaustic on canvas, 64 x 64"Scherman pioneered the revival of the ancient technique of encaustic, which involves wax mixed with oil paint and pigments. He scrapes, drips and burns the encaustic to create luminous and textured surfaces. As he perfected his technique, he learned that every painting is a practice “but only perfect practice makes perfect. Technically, I’ve gotten better and better and better. At the Royal College of Art that was my mission. I didn’t have talent but I had a good eye and pictorial taste. I didn’t have facility. I worked for every square inch.”Nero’s Birthday, encaustic on canvas, 40 x 36"He refers to the German art historian and theorist Hans Belting who wrote about the surface of the painting and the surface of the skin in a portrait. “My ability to collapse those two things is better,” Scherman explains. “I see the skin on the surface as a sensation of skin, not an optical illusion. It’s an esoteric component. When I paint I both affirm and deny the surface. I create another world behind the picture frame. I’ve reached a higher level of exhibiting both.”The Last Mussel, encaustic on canvas, 60 x 72"In Arcana Mundi he refers to “the esoteric secrets of the universe. There is esotericism moving throughout this series. Women have knowledge men can only gesture at. It’s a whole different kind of knowledge connected to the earth and its secrets. Woman is a vehicle for man to learn.”