Haley Greenwald-Gonella

I have been given a gift.  A gift of time–and one of travels and wanderings.  I was not able to attend the opening celebration for Victor Raphael’s show at USC’s Fisher Museum, but today I celebrated anyway.  Today, I was allowed to go out and find art.

I thought I would find it in the studios near the architecture school, but there was too much talking and explanation going on there for me to find anything of interest.  I traveled past the studios.  A large banner that read “open” beckoned me.

I consciously and carefully opened the right door and then I was freed.  Pen and notebook and a small gallery-of-a-museum.  I  felt like my mom should have been there–pointing out this work and that one.  I could almost hear my sisters complaining about  being dragged to yet another museum in the background, but then a single breath and I was back–unwrapping the gift of Victor  Raphael’s Travels and Wanderings 1979-2009.  I was pulled into his rich metallics of “unique iris on canvas” and the playful  landscapes of “Central Park UFO” and “Painted Desert UFO”.  I walked past Raphael’s less ethereal-looking “Floating World  Series” featuring Japan.  I was “[called] to prayer” in the largest synagogue in Istanbul by the Muslim call to worship, but for  much of the last hour, I was in space.

I felt at home in the white boarders surrounding the 20 majestic framed Polaroids in Raphael’s “Space Field Series”.  I was sucked into tiny black holes and miniature milky ways featuring barely-there gold-flecked planets.  I stopped reading the plaques detaining the materials used and I just enjoyed the art.  I wanted to sit on the floor and just stare at the work on the opposite wall.  I thought that this might be in poor taste considering the group of senior citizens who were utilizing wheelchairs while we explored (the) space together.

I crossed the hall into Malibu, found the Getty Villa–the “place [Raphael] uses as a refuge and resource for peace of mind.”  I met up with diminutive Venus de Milo and a silhouette of Winged Victory.

Raphael believes that “you have to leave room for the exceptional and extraordinary.”  And sometimes, on a day like today, you also have time for exceptional and extraordinary art.