Schifano is fascinated by photography. Interestingly, despite the many photographs of the artist with a camera—his “mechanical eye”—he rarely uses his own photographs as source images for his paintings. Instead, he prefers to draw on existing, publicly available images. In addition to television, the print media also provide him with a rich repertoire.
“I always cut photos out of newspapers, like children, and put them aside,” the artist himself describes his method. He projects this found image material from magazines and newspapers onto the canvas and then transfers it into painting.
En plein air (1964) is a painterly reinterpretation of a Volkswagen advertising campaign intended for the Italian market. While the original image features a family on a picnic outing with their VW, Schifano’s version leaves only a shadowy landscape and a green painted area in place of the advertised car. The title ironically refers to the French Impressionists’ practice of painting outdoors, as Schifano’s landscape was clearly not created in nature.
Current events and headlines from the press and media also find their way into Schifano’s work. He is particularly interested in the “Space Race,” the media-staged competition between the superpowers. The series Spazio (1965) is based on photographs of an American astronaut’s space walk in June 1965 and shows, from an unusual perspective, the legs of the astronaut in his space suit floating in space next to the capsule.
The large-format painting Tearful (1990) is based on a press photograph. It depicts the emotional farewell between an American soldier and his young son in the context of the Gulf War of 1990–91. The photograph was featured in TIME magazine in December 1990. In Schifano’s work, the pair is surrounded by a chaotic mix of colors that intensifies the emotional impact of the moment. The boy emerges from the scene as a white silhouette, both abstracted and highlighted.
The work testifies to Schifano’s attentive observation of world events and his ongoing interest in politics. At the same time, it contains a personal dimension. The birth of his son Marco in 1985 marked a turning point: The experience of fatherhood is reflected in the increasing emotionality of his later works. At the time the painting was created, Marco was around the same age as the child in the press photograph—a personal connection that is palpable in Tearful.
