 |  | Review by Nick Smale, site user
Mick Rafferty is exhibiting at The Gallery, Earlsdon, until 13 August 2003.
There is a delicate perfumed sensuality about the best of Rafferty’s collaged images.
The sensation is particularly noticeable in Awase you wear it well. Here, discrete areas are delicately tinted with emerald greens, peach colours, pinks and blues.
| |  | One of the pieces in the exhibition
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Rafferty’s use of Japanese papers and tracing paper allows the underlying paper support and the underlying images of his collages to show through, so that from a distance they are like exquisite water-colours, having the water-colours same delicacy and transparency.
His eye for aesthetics is evident in his choice of subjects: the refined elegance of beautiful Japanese courtesans and geishas, Japanese calligraphy and images of nature, plants and flowers, a constant source of inspiration to Japanese artists.
These received images of another culture and age are scanned and laser printed onto fine handmade Japanese papers and tracing paper often in vertical strips and layered over one another to give the works structure and depth.
The Japanese papers have a variety of textures, subtle tints and embedded plant fibres that are beautiful in themselves and add to the interest of these refined works.
| |  | One of Rafferty's collage pieces
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In Darkness over Kyoto and Atsui Desu Ne, the collages are assembled on dark blue/grey mounts which, because of the semi-transparent nature of the papers, helps to unify these images.
Such a technique was used successfully by the American artist, J.M.Whistler, who was incidentally a forerunner of the aesthetic movement.
Rafferty is no realist, he likes the stylised faces, the beautiful masks, of his Japanese subjects who remain idealised even when engaged in the most intimate activities.
Such occupations are not obvious at first glance; they are seen behind a layer of tracing paper as if through a semi-transparent screen.
There is nothing ‘in your face’ about Rafferty’s work and his Japanese beauties do not occupy any clearly defined space and there is no narrative. They seem ethereal and no longer serve any real purpose, detached as they are from their own world.
| |  | Print work by Rafferty
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Rafferty uses the same imagery for several paintings on canvas. Inevitably these do not have the elegant simplicity of the collaged works; the larger scale and the use of different materials and techniques that link the images together produce works that are much more physical.
I liked particularly Iris over Fuji. Despite using materials that might seem unsympathetic, the textures, colours and Pollock-like painting technique that Rafferty uses creates a depth and structure in this work which is both delicate and strong and succeeds in capturing a rare quality, that is still somehow Japanese in its vision of nature.
Iris Scandal and Femme Fatale are appealing small digital prints. In Femme Fatale the row of deep purple Iris blooms, like soft velvet, calls to mind the symbolic flower painting of O’Keeffe.
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