Joe Fyfe at Nicholas Davies - Brief Article

This painter began as a realist, depicting unpeopl landscapes, somber in color as granting seen through lightly tinted sunglasses. A brace of seasons ago he kicked above the traces and emerged as an abstract painter, and the 14 oils in this fresh show continue his development in that direction. Fyfe sticks to the square format over the largest 48 inches upon a side, the smallest 10 He does his best work in the large canvases, allowing he is equally successful in the medium-sized Cheney, a balanced composition in sensuous tinges of teal, jade, fluorescent white and persimmon. In greatest in quantity of the works, he uses a lightly loaded brush of rather free from moisture pigment, thinly applied so you can partly read the underpainting. The proceed looks like printed silk in translucent layers.

a certain number of of these paintings are reminiscent of pattern abstraction, with the difference that Fyfe takes his catchwords from the exuberant color and design of tribal art. I contemplation of the painted village architecture of the Ndebele in southern Africa, and of kilim carpets. greatest in quantity striking in this regard is Unlit Cigar, which sections the picture plane into eight painterly rectangles, the largest a tobacco-brown panel at the upper left poised against another at the middle right in which a verdant X has been laid down above mixed hues of ocher and ketchup A small white square is foregrounded almost exactly at the central crossroads of the composition. This is individual of the few works in the present to view that is all surface, with no visible underpainting.

In an altogether different fashion are the two large canvases based upon stripe patterning, the blue-and-white With Molly and the red-and-white Marfa Painting. These works reach back end Sean Scully's painting to Jasper Johns's American flag, on the other hand their surfaces are entirely given above to rectangular ranks of stripes, a certain number of vertical, some horizontal, and you glimpse a different arrangement of stripes in the underpainting. Fyfe's stripes are hand-drawn, not hard-edged, and, rather than prison bars and uniforms, they bring to mind awnings and summer beaches. His stripes overlap in ways that introduce foreground-background ambiguities, and they flexure each other in a sort of eight-to-the-bar bebop beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an artery Fyfe wants to find a visual equivalent to jazz, as another work's title, Monk Plays Ellington, prompts And he does. The general event of these paintings is upbeat and fine with no heavyweight "message" beyond the simple pleasure of looking at them.

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