September 20–27, 2001

art

Creature Comforts

Sand Boxing: Recent Paintings by Michael Frechette

through Oct. 14, Pentimenti Gallery, 133 N. Third St., 215-625-9990

Michael Frechette, Joan and Bucket, oil and shellac on linen.

Will it be possible to ever see an art exhibition or write about art in the same way after the horrific events that took place in our country recently? I can’t say, but something tells me that art is one of the things that has the power to engage and reinforce our humanity, and it might help us in some small way to get through the difficult days ahead.

Without a doubt, it’s worthwhile and heartening to venture out to see an exhibition of Philadelphia artist Michael Frechette’s newest paintings, his first solo show in several years. Over the past decade Frechette has developed an original artistic method: He searches for beauty in ordinary subjects using murky colors and industrial materials, and he coaxes something harsh and elegiac from these ingredients. In this new body of work, we also see for the first time an intimate and incongruous brand of humor, offered with deadpan earnestness. There are seven paintings on display, all with a single creature (a bird or dog) dramatically framed by a rich abstract surface. Up close you can see that the surfaces are made up of multiple layers of oil paint and shellac on linen, some strenuously sanded away to reveal different colors beneath. The unusual pairing of a pure abstract surface with a displaced animal protagonist — reminding me of early natural history prints and Japanese painted screens — gives the paintings a peculiar resonance.

Frechette’s three paintings of egrets and herons in the exhibition capture the graceful appearance and awkward motion of the birds and give them a frozen stillness that makes you wonder: artifice or taxidermy? Stripers off A.C. (42-inches-by-36-inches) is a painting of a running, flapping bird that Frechette saw while fishing (perhaps a great blue heron) surrounded by a dramatic pulsating field of color. The bird’s body is expressively rendered in layers of black, white, gray, mud brown and putty, and one wing flaps freely with distinct black feather tips, while the other — as if its creation is not yet complete — is still a solid form. The bird, understandably, appears agitated in its throbbing environment of olive, red, orange, black, brown and Naples yellow — what a surface! In this painting, more than any of the others, the heavily worked background plane transforms into a hazy and troubled landscape. In Storm Bird (42-inches-by-38-inches), by contrast, Frechette positions a strangely static close-up of the creamy yellow and white upper body of a huge and majestic egret against an eroded plane of green, gold and black. Even though the bird is beautiful, its black beak and inhuman eye give it a slightly ominous appearance. It seems stiffly unreal, like an ornithological specimen posed with a fragment of its former world, and yet strangely magical.

Two other paintings highlight the artist’s sense of humor, and both feature his pet toy fox terrier in a starring role. One, titled Joan, is an inky black-and-white image of the dog resting on a spongy ocher background. Seen from the front, the tiny dog is enlarged to enormous proportions and her legless body is a lumpy blob of black and white — like a Franz Kline painting. In Joan and Bucket a misshapen metal bucket sits upon a small, round black tabletop, perfectly centered in a (48-inch-by-72-inch) horizontally oriented canvas. Here, Joan’s head, painted with detailed realism, is peeking up from the lower right edge looking perky and curious. "What’s inside?" viewers wonder along with Joan the dog.

This show is somehow comforting in its quiet scrutiny of the unknowable and the ordinary. Frechette himself has said his paintings are "not unlike a staircase or a piece of furniture, which exists at the service of its users," and because of this there’s something practical and roughly generous about these paintings. It may offer some relief, in these traumatic times, to dwell quietly for a few minutes on these lovely and original paintings.

—Susan Hagen