FIDELITY IN FORM CLAUDIO BRAVO.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

This renowned Chilean painter blends modern palettes with deep-rooted traditions of the classical masters in canvases that meticulously replicate reality

Were you to spot Chilean artist Claudio Bravo on the street, you might take him for an investment banker or foreign diplomat. Immaculately groomed, refined in the double-breasted suits he favors, he presents himself to the world as the antithesis of the bohemian. Formality, order, tranquility, and patience define his personal manner, and much the same can be said of his art, which is rooted in traditions of those Old Masters who favored a classical standard of beauty and worked slowly to reveal their subject matter with rational clarity. Bravo, now in his early sixties, has never had much use for most art produced during his century. In an interview he once said, "To be modern means to be ugly. The only artist that convinces me is Balthus. The rest are a search for extreme ugliness." Such a charge cannot be directed at Bravo himself. The hundreds of paintings, pastels, and drawings he has painstakingly produced are widely admired for their harmony of form and color, fidelity to the real world, and timeless quality.

Currently Bravo spends a few months of the year at his finca on Lake Llanquihue in southern Chile but lives the majority of the time in Tangier in a villa overlooking the Moroccan coast. He also maintains an apartment in New York City, where regularly he exhibits his work at the Marlborough Gallery. A typical Bravo show usually consists of a mix of portraits, still lifes, interiors, and landscapes, but occasionally he confines himself to one theme, as was the case last March when he presented twenty-three large oils and pastels of nothing but cloth rendered with trompe l'oeil virtuosity.

On the morning after the opening (more than five hundred people had attended, and paintings worth over $2.5 million had been sold), Bravo kindly shared some of his time to explain his work. "I read once from Eduardo Chillida, the Basque sculptor, that if you took away all the drapery--that is, the illusion of painted cloth--in the canvases at the Prado in Madrid, you'd only have half a museum. It's absolutely tree! And in some paintings, it's the same. Consider Hans Memling's Descent from the Cross, for example: two-thirds of the painting is drapery. So for artists over the centuries, painted or sculpted drapery has been a way to express feelings--certainly since Phidias. Also it can be one of the most abstract parts of a painting."

"I started thinking about doing an entire exhibition like this after a 1998 show at Marlborough, which included three very successful paintings of cloth--red, yellow, and blue--which respectively I entitled Bacchus, Apollo, and Zeus. For the current show it was difficult to put names on works as they materialized because even though they were very realistic, they too were close to abstraction. But suddenly I did a triptych, a violet one that's not here, and you know, in Latin America, Italy too, for Good Friday of Holy Week, they put violet canvas on the altars, so I called it Viernes Santo. And in that moment I thought, why not go with Latin names for all the paintings and use some terms associated with the Catholic liturgy, because even though I am not very religious I was born Catholic and went to Jesuit schools. I don't want to be cynical, but sometimes I don't know what to call a painting, but then I look around and find some Latin term that appeals to me, and I use it. I also used names from works of religious music. Mozart had a great taste for names: Ave verum, Exultate jubilate, Magnificat, Benedictus. So did Verdi with his Dies Irae and Lacrimosa. I'm fond of Latin words. Once I bought an armoire from the Italian Renaissance now in my studio solely because it bore the word Archivium.

Their titles aside, Bravo's cloth paintings also possess a theatrical quality that derives from the dramatic manner in which he chose to drape, fold, or knot the lengths of fabric. "Sometimes it took a complete morning just to arrange the cloth, to make it really expressive with a certain touch of beauty. I worked out the colors beforehand using pastels on paper to create samples, which I took to a place near my farm called La Reunion, where they dye...