Western Exposure
The painterly world of Gerald Incandela
Photography by Lisa RomereinTwo hawks play in the clouds, then swoop down to the olive trees gracing a Summerland hilltop retreat named Montalba. Bordered by riding trails that wind down to the Pacific, this Mediterranean-style compound comprises inviting gardens, an improbably chic barn that sequesters a studio/darkroom, and an equally striking home—at once sensual and monastic—where Gerald Incandela focuses on the project at hand. Today, the artist is multitasking—the subject of this magazine photo shoot and his own self-portrait. Through the door he strides, leading Annibale, his white Andalusian stallion—all arching legs and flowing mane, rippling muscle and flipping tail—into a living room aglow in art and antiques.
“Come on, come on…,” he says, softly, in his silky French accent, coaxing the 15-year-old onetime national halter champion to clop, clop, clop with abandon across the 17th-century French limestone floor to the fireplace, thus joining him in an impromptu pose (in truth, the vision for his Christmas card) smack between a drawing by British minimalist Keith Milow and an 18th-century French court painting. “Good boy…come on, we neeeeed you….”
Incandela has set his well-worn Nikkormat, a classic 35mm film camera from the 1960s, on a tripod to capture the scene and stationed a friend beside it to hit the shutter button. The horse gazes at the cameras and crew with wide-set brown eyes. At first, they suggest restrained interest; within the hour, polite amusement verging on ennui. Still, there’s a carrot in this for the aristocratic beast that, along with its brethren, serves as muse for Incandela’s latest efforts—including a body of equine-theme work on view this fall at Santa Barbara’s Edward Cella Art + Architecture, the midcareer artist’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast.
The series is the continuum of a singular process Incandela invented nearly 30 years ago: the use of composite photographic negatives selectively exposed with developer on light-sensitive paper to create a single print, thereby transcending the limits of the camera. Since then, his work has landed in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Albright Knox Museum in New York; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Wagstaff Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in California; the private collections of such corporations as CBS, JPMorgan Chase, and Estée Lauder; and numerous galleries internationally.
He likes constructivism and suprematism, the Baroque and the minimalist, Malevich, Goya, Velásquez, rembrandt, The Venetian painters, James Turrell and Richard Serra.
“Gerald’s work is ravishing—so painterly one can hardly believe it begins with a photo,” says Karen Sinsheimer, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s curator of photography, noting that his technique presaged photographic collages such as David Hockney’s 1982 The Brooklyn Bridge.
In an expansion on his original process, Incandela now does “photo drawings,” large-format works created with a single negative, the developer applied with almost calligraphic brushstrokes. “I like to find the geometry, the armature of a subject—whether human or animal—and reduce that to as few marks as possible,” he says. Although past work appeared emotionless, with a sense of stopped time; the new work evokes movement and such qualities as raw power, poignancy, and tenderness—a development he attributes in part to his own maturity.
“Gerald refines what the camera sees to his vision,” says his local dealer, the gallerist and art historian Edward Cella. “He has essentially created a technique of merging drawing and photography—an almost arcane process that prefigures today’s post-camera manipulations. His work [exemplifies] the magic jewels in our midst that we rarely see.”
Incandela first came to town from New York in 1994. That same year he met his partner, former Madison Avenue antiques dealer George Schoellkopf, who grew up in Dallas—though his family had a summer home in Santa Barbara. “George has been coming here since he was a child,” he says. “At first I didn’t like it, but now I love it. People here still know what beauty is.”
While his grandparents hailed from Sicily, both he and his parents, a banker and a homemaker, were born in the then-French protectorate of Tunisia. “It’s a strange thing, culturally,” says Incandela, who reads French and English and speaks French, English, Italian, a little German and Arabic, and, in recent years, an increasing amount of Spanish. “My family was Italian, yet we were French, having French citizenship. And Sicilian is different than Italian. I think of myself as Mediterranean because I don’t know Italian culture even though I have Italian blood.”
When Incandela’s family to moved to France in 1969, the 17-year-old arrived at the University of Paris X in Nanterre a year after the infamous student rebellion that rocked the country. He graduated with a degree in philosophy, then set off to explore Berlin and Rome before settling in London in 1973. It was there that he began taking pictures. He also formed several pivotal friendships that would shape his future, starting with the late avant-garde British director Derek Jarman.
Known for calling his camera a paintbrush (as well as for his music videos of the Sex Pistols and Marianne Faithfull), Jarman cast Incandela in a series of art house films in the ’70s and introduced him to two more forces that the artist credits among his style influences: Thailand-based art dealer and collector Thilo von Watzdorf, a German aristocrat then working in London, and New Yorker Sam Wagstaff—the legendary curator and photography collector—an early Warhol proponent and, later on, the partner of controversial photographer and Incandela contemporary Robert Mapplethorpe.
Incandela wasn’t that keen on acting or movies, but he discovered his passion and talent for still photography. He was drawn to the geometry of objects such as a tripod or an umbrella, though he gained acclaim for his multiple negative approach as applied to environmental portraits, commissioned by the likes of German conceptual artist and political activist Joseph Beuys and Parisian socialite and Warhol pal Sao Schlumberger.
“Thilo gave me my first camera and helped me set up a darkroom in London,” he says. “And Sam—I remember arriving in New York in 1977 and going to visit him at his apartment in Greenwich Village. He had a vase of peonies, there was caviar, the sun was setting…I thought I was in a Turner painting.” Two weeks later, he bought a midtown apartment that he still keeps. “In New York, I felt at home instantly,” he says. “And right away, I was doing more portraits, though I didn’t believe in them. I did them, but not to capture the essence of somebody. I was totally the opposite of Mapplethorpe. Back then, I never liked to reveal anything about myself or the sitter in my work.”
Artforum championed a 25-year-old Incandela as “an underground celebrity among a small but growing band of collectors and critics.” Then, at 30, he opted for formal art training at the New York Studio School. “I spent four years at that place, then three at Parsons. I really got into it. All the other students wondered why I was there because, to them, I had already made it—[my work] was at the Museum of Modern Art. I did it for my old age, for when I reached 70 and wanted to retire from the world and paint. It actually opened a lot of doors in my photographic work—the drawing, especially, I’m now using for the first time.”
“It started with one horse,” Incandela says, summing up his life of late. He rolls his eyes. “As soon as I got the white one, I found out they also come in black….”
As for his fascination with horses, that sparked soon after he and Schoellkopf broke ground on Montalba’s 11-acre site in 1994 (the couple spends half the year in Connecticut). When a neighbor pointed out a serendipitous trail beside their property, he opted for a riding lesson from Carpinteria’s world champion trainer Tim Whitney. “Then I took a second lesson and, after a while, I had to have my own horse.” (Small irony that, although Schoellkopf rarely rides, his grandfather founded a Dallas-based company in the 1800s that, in its early years, traded in saddles and fine leather goods.)
Incandela practiced English-style riding and spent several frustrating years perusing English breeds on the East Coast. “I didn’t like their necks. I didn’t like their sides. I didn’t like their heads. I had an idea of what a horse should look like from baroque paintings, but I had yet to see it.” That is, until someone suggested he check out Andalusians.
“That was it,” he says. “That’s what I was after—I wanted living sculptures.” He traveled to Jerez de la Frontera in Spain to photograph the Andalusian bloodline preserved by an order of Carthusian monks. For several years, he edited Andalusian, the magazine of the breed’s international association. He has since taken up the Spanish-influenced Old California riding style under the tutelage of accomplished Summerland-based trainer Bruce Sandifer, a Montana native who wears a set of spurs made back in 1909 for his grandfather. And he found himself buying and breeding horses.
“It started with one horse,” Incandela says, summing up his life of late. He rolls his eyes, laughing. “As soon as I got the white one, I found out they also come in black….”
Today, along with Annibale, Montalba’s barn houses Andalusians Bruno, Byzantino, and Alba, as well as the latter’s foals, Honesto and Illuminata. Walking along their stalls, Incandela greets each one with affection. “I’m afraid I look at them much more than I ride them,” he confesses. For his work, meanwhile, he continues to draw from eight years’ worth of horse imagery. “I only printed all the negatives now because I finally knew how I wanted to approach them,” he says, marveling. “All of a sudden, everything clicked.” •
Santa Barbara Magazine
By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.
