A working studio practice with an obsession for true color
Roberto Azank, an Argentine-born painter working from a studio in Woodstock, New York, has a real practice: Wavefields — abstract color studies where he explores chromatic relationships. Lately every Wavefield has been a Palette Homage, a color study based on the palettes and color handling by the Old Masters. But a painter borrowing a palette needs the true palette, not the one centuries of yellowed varnish have left behind. So he began the digital restoration of the source files himself, one canvas at a time, for no audience but his own studio wall. His process is holistic, not selective: he never isolates or pushes an individual hue, believing that would reinterpret the work rather than reveal it. Instead, layers of accumulated grime and aged varnish are lifted from the painting as a whole — informed, wherever the historical record allows, by what's known of the pigments and aging involved — until the original colors separate and regain their vibrancy.
Then, the real work begins: standing before the canvas for hours, painting a physical homage, mixing the raw pigments, and tracing the master's light stroke by stroke, getting into their coloristic minds and understanding why the color palette works so well.
It is only after living inside the painting — understanding its hidden structure and color harmonies through physical creation — that he returns to the digital file. The second restoration is completely transformed by the experience of having painted the Palette Homage.
That is what makes an Unvarnished print uniquely alive: it is restored through the hand, eye, and physical color mastery of a working artist — a depth of color truth no algorithm could ever find.
This is an interpretation, not a conservation effort. No painting was touched. No varnish was physically removed, no pigment sampled, no laboratory involved. This is an artist's intimate, physical dialogue with the master, a painter looking hard at an aged painting and deciding what it may be hiding, what the original colors might have looked like when they were first painted by the masters.
Unvarnished grew out of that private practice — a way to share what those restorations revealed: color he believes is far closer to what the old masters originally painted, before time and varnish dulled it.
Roberto also exhibits and installs the Wavefields themselves — as originals, and as large-scale kinetic murals for galleries, architects and private collections. For that side of the work, visit robertoazank.com.
How we unvarnish
A painting doesn't give itself up to a glance. Before I restore one, I look at it for a long time, past the grime, the aged varnish and the drift of color, until the noise falls away.
Aged varnish lies over a whole painting, so we lift it from the whole painting at once, in Apple Photos and Adobe Photoshop.
No automatic controls, no hue isolated, no region masked or relit, and no AI.
I adjust the colors, always manually, until they fully separate, clean of varnish and of anything else that flattens the spectrum.
The skill is knowing where to stop: the point with the maximum amount of pure colors. Stop short, and time (varnish and decay) is still dictating the outcome. Go too far, and the colors start contaminating each other again.
Then I paint each palette by hand as an abstract Wavefield Homage, using that first restoration as my model and focusing on the juxtapositions: which color sits against which. Then the roles reverse. I make a second restoration using the painting as my model. I trust the painting, even when the colors come out wilder than in my first restoration. That is the Unvarnished version.
Last, I clean up surface damage within limits, to see as much of the painting as possible without changing its presence. Cracks, saponification (the soap-like blooms of aged oil paint), and paint loss are retouched by hand, pixel by pixel, one at a time, repairing damage without changing any color or light. Where a painting needs its age, I soften the cracks instead of removing them all, because a surface with no age at all looks like plastic. This is the longest part of the work.
I can't know what the artist saw on the day the painting left the easel. What I can do is interpret it. After more than two hundred restorations and homages (all of them at robertoazank.com), you develop an eye, and I have my own test for when it's right: when the colors separate to the maximum, each one as pure as it can be without contaminating its neighbor. That is my reading of the original vision. It is not a certainty, but it is a lot closer than what hangs on the wall today.
These are my versions of what I think the painters painted. You be the judge.
Palette Homages.
Every painting in the collection exists here because Roberto painted a homage to it — an abstract work built from the restoration's recovered palette.
Each Wavefield is painted on a support he turns as he works, so it has no single right way up — it is composed to work at any angle. Several mounted together can become a kinetic mural: every panel turns independently, none in step with the next, so the composition never repeats.
The Wavefields, turning.
Mounted together, the Wavefields become a kinetic mural: every panel turns independently on its own axis, so the composition is never quite the same twice. Roberto installs these as large-scale commissions for galleries, architects and private collections.
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Browse the collectionI treat the painting as a whole. I never isolate different hues independently and push them, as I fear that would "reinterpret" the work, which is not my intention at all. When the colors finally separate and regain their vibrancy, I believe I have reached what the artist intended, as best I can.