Franz Gertsch, Silvia: Chronicle of a Painting

Switzerland: Lars Müller, Baden, 2000. Small quarto; 155 pages: illustrations (some color); 25 cm Fine in fine faintlty sunned jacket now in archival mylar. Hardcover. ISBN: 9783907078198, 3907078195

"The deliberate approach of Franz Gertsch - who takes (hyper)realistic painting as the starting point for fashioning his view of people and things into an independent reality - represents something of an exception within the world of contemporary art, just as Gramaccini has succeeded in creating an exceptional example of contemporary art-historical writing. ... Silvia: The Chronicle of a Painting - as much work has been invested in the ideas behind this unpretentious title as has gone into the creation of the painted portrait itself and the chronicle that accompanies it. Gramaccini achieves a true poetics of description, in which the precise technical terms for the anatomical or artistic details are able to give shape, precisely and coherently, to this portrait of a young woman. In designing the book, this parallel process of creation has been interspersed with photographs of the painting process and with details from the finished painting. As a result, the portrait Silvia by Franz Gertsch is assembled not only through the linguistic form of the description but also through a visual process in the act of reading itself."--Jacket // Translation from the German of Franz Gertsch - Silvia, Chronik eines bildes, published in 1999 Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.), Gertsch, Franz, Peinture de portraits, Portrait painting