Visual fireworks
Fries even throws in kitchen sink in his photo-realistic oils
In 2007, an immense self-portrait by A. J. Fries loomed large on the south wall of the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls.
There was the bespectacled Fries, his face stretched across hundreds of cocktail napkins in shades of Guinness and Merlot, staring down on gallerygoers like some barroom egotist, maybe judging the rest of the art in the gallery and maybe judging the people who dared to stare into those alcohol-stained eyes.
The piece seemed like a big and unabashed self-hug, Chuck Close-style, a far cry from Fries’ previous body of work, which featured meticulously painted representations of commercial objects that seemed to speak about the peculiarities of American desire with what critics and curators referred to at the time as a deadpan humor.
In “Ignoring the Sirens,” a new show of Fries’ work at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, the artist has veered off into completely unexpected territory. Gone are the Twinkies and American flags and unmentionable battery-powered items of his past work. Gone are all those cocktail napkins. Gone is Fries’ wicked humor and, in fact, any easily discernible sense of the artist himself.
You might miss him, but then again you might be intrigued by the unexpectedly quiet place he takes you.
The new paintings, each a master class in photo-realistic oil painting and largely monochromatic, luxuriate in the accidental beauty of everyday phenomena. One captures a mountain of translucent soap bubbles floating on white enamel. Another gives us streaks of self-possessed water blowing across a glass pane; another presents the eye-crossing vortex of water swirling counter-clockwise down a stainless steel drain.
Fries has painted the sort of images that often appear on the last two frames of disposable cameras. They happen when, eager to exhaust the roll so we can run to Walgreens to extract our full-color memories, we snap a picture of the most immediate beauty we can find.
Staring into the square of “Dishwater,” in which Fries has expertly suspended a mass of bubbles in paint and time, we contemplate all those apparently banal images that, upon close and sustained inspection, reveal themselves as visual fireworks worthy of National Geographic.
Formally, Fries seems to have an older relative in the work of Vija Clemins, known for painting slices of the sea and sky in a photo-realistic style that owe, as curator John Massier writes of Fries, very little to the surface allure of photo-realism. Where Clemins’ work produces a sense of wonder at the universe and its immensity, Fries’ paintings say something similar about the kitchen sink.
But it seems too simple to conclude that Fries’ photographic approach is merely an expressive tool. He clearly revels in technique, in the raw ability to transform streaks on canvas into convincing images ripe for contemplation. Let’s not be scared about embracing the technique along with the idea.
For Fries, the object itself shares its importance with what is admittedly a very well-trod idea: the contemplative space and quotidian beauty lost to the rush of time.
PREVIEW
WHAT: “A. J. Fries: Ignoring the Sirens” runs concurrently with “Jon Haddock: Vintage Mouse Porn”
WHEN: Through Dec. 18
WHERE: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 341 Delaware Ave.
TICKETS: Free
INFO: 854-1694 or www.hallwalls.org
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