Napoleon Bonaparte: Italy

Provenance:
Private Collection, Alabama

Literature:
Leah Ollman, Tony Scherman: About 1789, Soma Gallery, 1998, unpaginated

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Tony Scherman, Chasing Napoleon: Forensic Portraits, 2000, pages 67 and 123, reproduced page 46, listed page 124
Notes:
During his early childhood, Tony Scherman lived in Paris and had an opportunity to visit the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte at the age of five years. Scherman recounts in an interview, "I remember going to Les Invalides to see Napoleon's tomb, and seeing this big, brown, incomprehensible thing, the spookiest shape, clearly Napoleonic, Empire-style, but at the same time not." From that early visit, the infamous Napoleon entered a section of Scherman's memory and would not be forgotten. Decades after the initial visit, Scherman developed an intriguing series of works entitled Chasing Napoleon. Documents such as official and unofficial portraits, commemorative paintings, prints and illustrations were thoroughly researched by the artist. However, it would be incorrect to cite Scherman as just a painter of history. He departs from the conventional model of historical painting - narratives that provide a straightforward representation - and thus avoids the classical representations of Napoleon, dressed in military regalia and exuding confidence. The result is Napoleon Bonaparte: Italy, a uniquely intimate portrait, as the magnified close-up of his face with his direct gaze showcases a vulnerable and contemplative side of the erstwhile military and political figure. In true Scherman form, the work transcends the luminous surface, and Leah Ollman states of his amplified portraits, "In the paintings, they are simply daunting presences, mirrors to our own capacities, our own moral range, the multiple possibilities of the self. Looking back through time compels us to look within."

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Adding to the interest of the work is the encaustic technique where Scherman drips, scratches and pours hot wax and pigment onto the canvas, a method in which he is unsurpassed. His first experimentation with encaustic can be traced back to 1973 at Royal College, where Scherman was completing his MA. At the time he was only drawing and had not painted for two years. A professor introduced him to encaustic, and the battle-scarred surfaces began to emerge, very physical and dynamic in nature. The flexible and reversible quality of encaustic permits Scherman to remove paint layers, as exemplified in the noticeable absences of paint in Napoleon Bonaparte: Italy. Such absences do not appear in every Scherman work, but when they do, act as temporal traces and as reminders of the artist's presence. Furthermore, the medium allows the pictorial representation to be interpreted without definitive closure as opposed to the sense of finality that can be perceived in other mediums. The work suggests that Napoleon, as with other historical figures, is a subject of contention and change over the passage of time. As a result, Napoleon Bonaparte: Italy shimmers with a physical immediacy that brings this iconic figure from the past firmly into the present. Scherman stated, "My paintings are my interface with people, living ones as well as dead ones. Images make it possible for anyone in history to talk to anyone else." Such a conversation is undoubtedly intriguing, especially when executed in such an alluring manner.