Mirrors and windows

Synapses were firing in my mind, and then a small pop, and for some reason, I thought of him again. That painter, Ian Francis. I hadn’t seen his work in years, and he had progressed so nicely. He navigates a world between painting and photography almost, and avoids both of their cliches. We piece together relationships from the figures in this unrecognizable landscape. We view these interactions in a new, clear context.

Immediately, this lit inside my mind a new direction for the experimental, post-Impressionist photography I’ve been doing, and where the next level is. Ahhhh, wonderful.

Roberto Matta (1911-2002) was a Chilean painter who shifted between surrealist and abstract painting like a ghost in one of his misty otherworldly landscapes. Early on he described his work as a series of ‘inscapes,’ where the paintings served ‘as visual analogies for the artist’s psyche.’ This expanded into reflections of our increasingly mechanized and war-torn world.

Matta effectively created a parallel world to ours, creating dread, cruelty, longing, passion and domination with shapes and colors minutely reminiscent of fists, teeth, masks, hips, knives, screens, meeting rooms and the structures of machines. We piece together a world in our minds from these shards and splotches, calling up emotions in this connection that we may not have been able to access directly.

During an unfortunately brief visit to the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, I became enthralled by the wondrous worlds created by Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo in the 1950-60s.

Adrian Ghenie inhabits a similar space as Francis Bacon. His dark browns and grays form a dark nether world of men hiding under desks, figures floating over others that are asleep and pies in the face that look like deformities.The image that captivated me at the Armory Show is not available on the internet (or is, but only part of the image).