Unphotography

In a season when a number of dealers and publications have been touting "photographic realism" as the latest new trend, at least two of Manhattan's abler painters have proudly displayed what might be called unphotographic realism. Their canvases differ widely, but both Jack Beal, 37, and Joseph Raffael, 36, invest the visible world with invisible qualities of fantasy and imagination.

Large, big-shouldered and calmly slow of speech, Virginia-born Jack Beal does not consider his pensive portrayals of present-day odalisques as outright fantasy. Rather, he says, they are a reaction against the ephemeral daydreams he spun as a child in the orphanages to which he was periodically committed because both his parents (now dead) were Faulknerian alcoholics. "Southerners," says he, "can be terribly hung up on fantasies." Schooled in painting at the Chicago Art Institute, Beal builds his compositions as carefully as any Abstractionist--and the sofa or chair in his pictures is as important as the figures. He lives five months of the year at a farm on Black Lake in the St. Lawrence River valley. He poses his sculptress wife or a model nude on soft, contoured upholstery because they are more comfortable that way, and occasionally, he incorporates the softly rolling contours of hills seen through a window because "I guess I'm trying to say how much they're all alike, chairs and women and hills." Only the colors that he uses are subtly brighter than those that he sees before him, because "I'm trying to make paintings about the way I'd like the world to be--beautiful, colorful, dangerous, complex."

Brooklyn-born Joseph Raffael on the other hand, has found the world on occasion a little bit too dangerous and complex. He first won renown in 1965 with grotesquely fragmented, pop-oriented paintings of animals such as test monkeys wired into laboratory chairs. Looking back, Raffael says that he thinks that he was trying to "make vulnerable paintings about pain, haltingly, blindly. But it is hard to maintain open wounds. They've got to close or be treated."

Precious Relic. He has treated the wounds with biweekly visits to a mental therapist, having also experimented with marijuana, astrology, numerology and spiritualism. Despite his varied researches, Raffael does not come on, as he says, "like some kind of mystical freak," possibly because he leads a relatively sedate life with his recently acquired wife and her two children by a previous marriage on a farm in Bennington, Vt. His latest oils, shown at Manhattan's Stable Gallery this winter, also show a new, monumental serenity. Raffael now likes statelier themes: an Egyptian bust, a gem-encrusted crown, raised to a magical, almost religious level by his extraordinarily vibrant brushwork and imaginative palette. "I'm withdrawing a bit," he says, "searching for what archaeologists call 'a find,' for the jewels we can dig out of us." His Salmon is such a precious relic--a dying fish preserved by the artist's reverent brush as a glowing emblem of life.

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