Lot 71: RICHARD WATHEN

Lucien
Signed, titled and dated "Richard Wathen, Lucien, 2007" on the reverse.

62 5/8 x 44 1/2 in. (159.1 x 113 cm)

oil on linen laid on aluminum

2007

New York, <em>Richard Wathen</em>, L&amp;M Arts, May - June 2007

Acquired directly from the artist

"Richard Wathen smoothly applies oil paint onto linen stretched over aluminum... The soft, sweet palette and the velvety surfaces of the paintings create a soothing sense of harmony from which tensions embedded in the cryptic images slowly and hauntingly emerge. In fact, these work's most absorbing mystery is not why the imagined subjects float in space but how passive and uncritical of their vacant surroundings they seem, even while the masterfully rendered animals radiate anxiety and emotional depth... Wathen perhaps intends his rabbits to represent the children's vulnerabilities, but they outperform that function and take on emotional awareness and engagement. The people Wathen paints are composite creations culled from snapshots, art history, vintage photographic portraits, and other eclectic sources, but the images' most compelling aspect evokes the work of Stubbs and his fellow English artists who rendered psychologically sensitive portraits of animals. The soulful look in the rabbits' eyes disquietingly contrasts with the glazed, gentle expression worn by their human familiars... Wathen's romantic, misty landscape accentuates the obvious psychological complexity and depth of his paintings' real protagonists."

(Honigman, Ana Friel. <em>Richard Wathen</em>, Artforum, March 2009.)