If buildings were women, painter John Ferry might be the world's greatest lover. Attentive. Straightforward. Able to appreciate flaws and celebrate quirks, like crumbling chimneys, or a rain gutter that doesn't quite fit. And to mix a metaphor, as loyal as an O's fan back in 1988, when they went 0-21. Ferry's love affair with buildings--and baseball--forms the core of
Construction at C. Grimaldis Gallery. Working from a combination of original photographs and personal visual experience, Ferry develops obsessive relationships with his architectural subjects. Like Monet with his Japanese bridge, Ferry often paints the same building multiple times, carrying the viewer through degrees of abstraction. In his "Fells Point" series, for instance, Ferry follows a single asymmetrical building through some serious stylistic changes. Several views of the structure, like "Fells Point, Baltimore," are heavy with rust-red, van Gogh-like globs of color, while others, like "Fells Point #1," interpret the building as a series of clean-lined, blocky forms.
More still life than cityscape, Ferry's work often singles out pieces of buildings and explodes them until their architectural context is obscured. The "Kansas City" series, which illustrates a building in the artist's current home city, is especially inscrutable. Each small panel's extreme closeup composition makes it nearly impossible to figure out what, exactly, you're supposed to be looking at. Based solely on this, it'd be easy to pigeonhole Ferry as an artist who values formal experimentation over audience engagement. Of course, then we'd have to ignore his "Camden Yards" series ("Camden Yards, #1" is pictured here). Unsentimental, accurate, and easily the most accessible work in the show, Ferry's stadium studies capture the hazy visual quality of sunlight spilling across manicured grass--a worthy homage to a beloved local landmark.
More puzzling and much less accessible, however, are the gouache "Field" paintings, which reduce a baseball diamond to its simplest geometric components by contrasting black space with white. When placed next to the "Camden Yards" images, the rounded lines of "Field #19," "Field #40," and the like are given some sense of context, but the overall effect is confusing nevertheless. The "Fields" paintings are interesting as an exercise in composition, compelling viewers to mentally rearrange the 19 panels on display, searching for continuity, patterns, or--more importantly--anything that might resemble home plate.
Ferry's desire to explore purely nonobjective forms is admirable and an interesting contrast to some of his more straightforward work, but overall his "Field" series is a swing and a miss. Their fragmented shapes feel like rough drafts next to his other studies--the visual equivalent of staring at someone's elbow, instead of looking him or her in the eye. The other work in Construction proves that John Ferry is at his best when he embraces his favorite buildings, gazes deeply into their dusty windows, and gives us the whole picture, chimneys and all.
Latest MP3s
