Flesh and Oil: The Trademark Techniques of Sir Peter Paul Rubens

If I were to describe this painting in one word, I would say it's explosive. It would be urgent. It's reflective. It's introspective. This painting just pops out. It's got such an energy. When you're standing in front of this painting, there's an enormous resonance. It's an immediate impact. There's a near hypnotic quality to this portrait. It has this extraordinary ability to draw you in, and that power, that sense of immediacy, is what so many painters have been trying to achieve ever since and to this very day. This is a painting by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of a Man as Mars. It is in breathtaking condition. The paint surface on this painting is extraordinary. It's a work that looks as fresh today as probably the date it was painted almost 400 years ago. This is the only single allegorical portrait that Rubens did in his career. It's a portrait of a man, an anonymous man, as the god of war. This painting is looking back to antiquities, but there's something about the execution and the painterly technique and the immediacy of impression that is very contemporary. He obviously painted this work with a loaded brush, thick paint, and you can see it wherever you look in the painting. There's an incredible play of surface textures between the shiny, hard armor and the soft and sensuous fur and plume coming out of the helmet. It's in the texture of the feather. It's in the texture of the curls of hair housed beneath his helmet. You see the sort of joy that Rubens has imparted over the centuries to contemporary artists working today. The hallmark of Rubens to me is bodily flesh. You even have the word Rubenesque, which has sort of entered into common language, and yet it also seems universal. There's this famous Willem de Kooning quote where he talks about how flesh is the reason that oil paint was invented. You can see in the forearm exactly that kind of sensuality, that almost carnality, which Rubens manages to achieve in his application of paint. Rubens' application is the birthplace of abstraction as a whole. It's the birthplace of Impressionism. It's the birthplace of what Kandinsky will do when he moves into perfect abstraction. It's what you see in Pollock. It's what you see in Rothko. It's what you see more contemporaneously in artists such as Cecily Brown. There's this idea of the figure being moved into the abstract space through the application of oil paint. Artists like Picasso, where you see that incredible energy and immediacy in his execution and spontaneity in the brushstroke, like Jenny Saville very much, you see that sort of tactility in the treatment of flesh. Even John Curran today is influenced by Rubens, and you can see it in his fleshy, naked figures. Robert Longo, who spoke to us for the catalogue, also said he was incredibly impacted by Rubens. But for me, the most important aspect of Rubens, exemplified in this painting, is his ability to depict a human subject. It's the way that portraiture here has been transformed into something that is completely individual and unique. When looking at a man, you're looking into his eyes, and through his eyes, something of the portal of his soul. In that way, you can see an immediate parallel with an artist like Francis Bacon, whose paintings absolutely render the idea of experiencing a human being, rather than the photographic representation of them. I've always thought this picture speaks to me in a way that Rubens only speaks to me when he's doing his family, his brother, he himself, his kids, his wives, because it's so impactful and so personal and so intense. He painted perfectly and perfectly. He created mood, and his works are incredibly realistic and vivid without being precise. And they give a sense of movement, and it's in that imprecision that things really come to life.