Karel Funk
Art wrung from the most unpromising sources can have a startling grace: think of John Coltrane’s take on ‘My Favourite Things’ or Bill Evans’ impossibly melancholy ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’. In his solo début Karel Funk riffed on various styles of academic and contemporary realism, his painting technique virtuosically photo-direct and his portraits of rather average young men unexpectedly nuanced.
The relatively modest size of Funk’s acrylic-on-panel portraits nonetheless accommodates vast amounts of detail. He makes clinical note of every shaving nick and skin blotch, each strand of hair and eyelash. In Untitled #3 (2003) he even examines the look of contact lenses. Despite their compactness, the images have an expansive presence: the sitters’ heads dominate each canvas, a bland, silvery shimmer of a screen their only background. Though the photographic basis for the work is obvious, the portraits are more than merely expert reproductions of mechanical images. What the camera records Funk investigates, and it is in this process of acute observation that his work jettisons the bluntness of hyperrealism to achieve a remarkable eloquence.
Working from specific photographs, the portraits are oddly unphotographic. Close inspection reveals the deceptively smooth surfaces to be composed of many layers (in interviews Funk has said they often number in the hundreds), their cumulative effect considered rather than laboured over, each a refinement and a simplification. The canvases are modelled on head shots, a modern convention with the specific purpose of identification and selling. Despite their meticulous detail, Funk depicts ordinary Joes dressed in humdrum windcheaters and hoodies. His subjects are a counterpoint to the advertisements and publicity shots that clutter modern life, the preternaturally friendly faces intended to convey great intimacy, whose actual information is entirely useless. His young men have a gravity and seriousness missing from the vapidly smiling mugs that assault us every day. Unlike their crass advertising equivalents in Benetton ads, Funk’s young men remain elegantly remote, as unknowable as the ancillary players in a panel painting by Tommaso Masaccio or Paolo Uccello.
In his seamless images Funk devotes to rip-stop nylon the same loving attention painters of previous eras once gave to ermine robes and silk drapery. In Untitled #9 (2004), for example, the upturned collar and shoulder of a slicker resemble carefully tanned pigskin. Toggles and zippers stand in for the jewels and symbolic props of early portraiture, with the difference here being the lack of any discernible allegorical message. Eyes are shown obliquely if at all, with the subject seen in profile, or turned away from the viewer or with eyes closed. There’s no emotional clue with which to decode these faces, their expressions so absent they occasionally seem like death masks.
This is especially true of Untitled (Blue Hood) (2002) and Untitled #7 (2004), in which the cowl-like hoods lend Funk’s subjects a certain monastic countenance, perhaps less for their religiosity than their dignity. Funk’s references to earlier portraitists feel less painterly than musical. He plays off their themes, alluding to the physiognomic detail of Chuck Close, the nearly abstract planes of Alex Katz and the materialistic specificity and scale of Hans Memling or Jan van Eyck. Of all such earlier precedents, the work perhaps draws most from Caravaggio, whose prescient cinematic sense included not just his theatrical mise-en-scène and use of light but also an intuitive feel for the importance of the well-placed extra. (Echoes of his Musicians of 1595–6 can be discerned in the averted gaze of the fellow in Untitled #4, from 2003.) Funk’s enigmatic everyday guys seem less individual than torn from some unknown context, bit players in an inaccessible panorama. Their ordinariness is insistent, as is their ability to blend in. They require an unusual amount of attention.
By isolating the vehemently average, Funk asks the viewer to question the apparent readability of surface cues. This is very different from feeling the need to point anything out, let along confront or shock. Funk encourages you to linger and note, to discriminate between information and understanding. A terrific amount of tension is created from the paradox of seeing without knowing and the illusion of transparency by way of layered opacity. With all the technical dexterity on display, the oddest effect of Funk’s masterful paintings is their evocation of a nearly forgotten quality: true humility.
