The Palazzo Rocca Contarini Corfu is one of these sumptuous Venetian palaces, admirably placed at the corner of the Grand Canal and that of San Trovaso. Exterior and interior adorned with marble and gardens, frescoed ceilings and monumental staircase. For Jim Dine to present his recent works there, at the Venice Biennale, seems, a priori, a strange idea. Dine, who was born in 1935 in Ohio, is famous for his powerfully colored compositions, in which, from the 1960s, he introduced objects – tools most often, the figure of Pinocchio, hearts or heads seen from the front treated with broad gestures.
The tone is set from the garden: tall bronze vases bristling with hammers, pincers and blades. The title of the exhibition, “Dog on the Forge”, is written in bronze letters on the handle of a twisted carpenter’s hammer more than four meters long, also made of bronze. The question is therefore obvious: what are Dine and his works doing in this place which seems so unsuitable for them?
“Measure yourselfthe artist first responds. When the paintings arrived from my studio, they appeared completely different to me: it was as if they belonged to the palazzo. I was very surprised. » The same goes for the visitor. On the ground floor, where the rooms have fairly low ceilings and bare walls, the small paintings of heads are perfectly at home; likewise the very large ones in the noble gallery, upstairs, where they get along well with the decorative elements and the allegorical frescoes.
Attachment to ancient art
Jim Dine would like to remind you immediately: he has often stayed in Venice and has already exhibited there. But the main thing, for him, is his attachment to ancient art. “Of course, I am classified as pop art, because I used tools in my paintings. But, actually, I have nothing to do with pop culture. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, who were all a little older than me, looked for elements of their style there. They were from bourgeois families, and it was not the world of their childhood. Me, yes, because I was born in a working environment. When I arrived in New York, I was a young guy who looked at Matisse, Bonnard and Picasso, not Coca Cola. And when De Kooning said to me: “Dine, you’re a real painter,” it made me feel good, because that’s what I wanted to be. »
This will be, in the entire conversation, the artist’s only allusion to pop art. It is much more important for him to explain how, six years ago, he spent the winter in Rome. He managed to obtain the possibility of using a church as a workshop. “It was a small church, nothing remarkable. But I had the key, and there were sculptures, and I like to draw sculpture. » Four of these drawings are here: a deposition of a cross, two female figures and a candlestick. These large charcoals have been worked and reworked – “with fingers, rubbing” – in the church, then in his workshop in Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine). “I could still rework them. » It is the same with his paintings, which take a very long time to complete. “I always take them back, I correct them, I tend towards a perfection that I will naturally not achieve. »
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