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Alan Feltus: New Paintings
Ann Nathan Gallery "Alan Feltus: New Paintings" has opened at Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago. This current exhibition, presented in cooperation with Forum Gallery, New York, offers eighteen oils on linen by an American artist now living in Assisi, Italy -- Alan Feltus. Until June 17, 2000, Chicago gallery visitors will have the opportunity to experience a distinct and contemporary voice by an artist who, as the Renaissance formed Antiquity anew, has himself re-formed a Renaissance sensibility; and who reveals it to be very much robust and timely. Feltus is an artist who has gathered, as poet Ezra Pound in his Canto 81 once advocated, "from the air a live tradition/ or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame." A vocabulary of gesture -- Mediterranean, but with persistent Gothic traits: primarily French, a Northern European idiom. This is the milieu of Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, whom art critic, John Brunetti, cites in the exhibition catalogue as Feltus' "pivotal inspiration for his paintings, figurative works not painted from live models, but instead from incorporating observations of these artists' masterworks with memories." Brunetti's essay is entitled "Silent Gestures: The Body Language of Alan Feltus" and is it on the mark. In these paintings, pose and stance, and their function within the composition are what made a powerful first impression among viewers at the opening. That impression strikes a very contemporary tone since, as Brunetti observed: "...despite the multiple visual connections throughout the composition, the figures remain emotionally aloof from each other. This is the poignancy that underscores his work."
As in much early Italian Renaissance painting, Feltus's people rarely seem to direct their eyes toward a viewer. (There are such works, but they are less frequent.) Emotional aloofness, alienation or free-floating malaise has been a recurring theme of the century, and Feltus's works thus seem very contemporary in sensibility, and, in a sense, they are. But Feltus counterpoints against centuries of artistic repertoire, and his art draws great strength by it. In fact, however, most of these works escape a specific time, and place. Attention is focused intently on the personae -- their postures and expressions; and this allows a subtlety of situation, without tedium or conventions which, because contemporary and suffused, seem mundane. A convention of body language, if sufficiently distanced from us, is no longer a convention. And yet, if sufficiently familiar, it permits us to respond freshly to a new context. Feltus has shown wise instincts in his art. E.H.Grombrich in "Action and Expression in Western Art," remarked:
The paintings of Alan Feltus are suffused with 'decorum.'
Gothic traits, 'manners,' 'decorum': Giotto still retained much of the Gothic, while melding the new Mediterranean, Renaissance 'mannerisms' into his art. North European culture remained more resistant. Gombrich notes "that the Northerner will tend to find the expressive movements of the Latin nations over-emphatic and theatrical," and adds: "contemporary English students can be incredulous if they are told that Leonardo may really have intended the intensity of gesticulation he used in the Last Supper... to convey the disciples' reaction to Christ's words that one of them would betray him." Feltus catches an inspiration precedent to that later, Southern Renaissance ebullience. For this very reason, the paintings of Alan Feltus seem neccesary to our exaggerative age. Feltus's use of 'decorum'; his melding of naturalistic effect -- an art basic to the eye, with a pictographic approach -- a meditation on 'what occurs,' in preference to the 'why' and 'how': situational content; all this is akin to practice explored by Giotto and that artist's contemporaries prior to AD 1400. (Gombrich's essay details the post-Classical, late Mediaeval, 'pictographic' art -- art to be 'read,' and he contrasts it with naturalistic art, Classical and Renaissance, art to mimic vision, noting artists named by Feltus as mentors to be transitional.) The carriage -- posture and bearing, and gesture -- of Feltus's subjects does in fact enjoy a long familiarity. One looks at Last Dance (37 1/2"x48": 1998), the woman's right hand, fingers cupped toward breast-bone; and here it seems coy, inviting, but with reserve and discretion. The gesture's evolution begins with Classical naturalism, the Venus Pudica, where it bespoke an alluring self-modesty. It was later transferred to religious imagery, where the saintly alluded to their own persona while disclaiming vanity. In Assisi, current residence of Alan Feltus, within the Basilica of St. Francis, Simone Martini's St. Francis exhibits the same gesture. [In Assisi: The Frescoes in the Basilica of St. Francis (Rizzoli: 1997)] And it is there in Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (ca.1485). Not surprising, as the repertoire developed for the sacred often was transferred into the secular, and often had still earlier roots in Classical paganism: a repertoire of body language, distanced but familiar. Alan Feltus's art draws on this, and further endows it with a new, again vernacular connotation. In Feltus's art, decorum and gesture are choreographed, deliberate and situational; and yet seem plausible, if not wholly natural. Feltus's harmonization of naturalistic light -- 'lume' or illumination -- with 'claritas' -- an iconographic light -- what art historian Paul Hills termed a substitution of "colour contrasts for the unmatchable luminary contrasts"; all this focuses even more attention on body language and, especially, on space -- what passes between people. Hills' The Light of Early Italian Painting (Yale University Press: 1987) is instructive in answering why Feltus' art is so striking; indeed, Hill noted the approach in Duccio di Buoninsegna (c.1255/60-1315/18): "The light of Duccio's Maesta is of two kinds: the conventional light of modelling that moulds faces and distinguishes facets of the throne, and light which is more like a pulse, transmitted by the conjunctions of colours and rhythms of patterns." In Feltus' art, the 'naturalistic' light sources and their shadows are subordinated. Contour, the flow of form, and the color and rhythm of objects are a means of perceptual focus. The artist builds, not toward a now conventional 'realism,' but toward an unexplicated, but implied context. Feltus's paintings offer a situational subtext, rather than an analysis of the individual personalities. What grasps a viewer is not the gaze of portraiture, a window to a 'psychoanalyzed' soul, but the contact between personae. Because of this, the artist's most powerful works are the linens with multiple subjects, situational tableaux. In Hotel Paradiso (39 1/4"x47 1/4":1999), the formal composition is consummate. In the exhibition catalogue, John Brunetti notes the "visual movement" in Feltus's paintings. Hotel Paradiso seems a moment of repose, but: "the implied entwined postures of a man and woman lounging on the floor is echoed by the Art Nouveau curves of a bent-wood rocking chair in the background." Feltus utilizes line, light and strategic, rather than aesthetic composition to create an iconology for our time. Alan Feltus does not paint photographs. He has, in this, again gained much from Italy. A good part of Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford University Press: 1984) is a succinct overview of Renaissance art's methods and their geometries, perspective, balance, measure. This spirit permeates Feltus's art, and it is masterfully handled to great effect. In what way? Baxandall does discuss Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano; its Renaissance acuity of geometry and counterpoise in composition, its play against intentional ambiguities. And, like Uccello, cited as a mentor, Feltus proves highly agile in marshalling these resources. Baxandall writes: "The geometrical concepts of a gauger and the disposition to put them to work sharpen a man's visual sense of concrete mass." In Hotel Paradiso -- as in so little current painting -- the gestures, and 'body language,' are very natural... and at the same time, composed and orchestrated to reveal an insight which is not overt, enumerative, circumscribed: there are no patent psychological cliches, but rather a complex interplay, an awareness of their own lives among the painter's subjects. Just what it is that transpires is a challenge to the viewer. In these canvases, the geometries of composition, visual flow of line, a dual schema in the use of light, and the placement of 'telling detail' -- letters, envelopes, ancillary prints and art images -- all contribute to Feltus's evocation of a contemporary spiritual state. Baxandall noted of Fifteenth Century Italian art: "The effective unit of the stories was the human figure," adding "The figure's individual character depended less on its physiognomy -- a private matter largely left to the beholder to supply... than on the way it moved." One may add 'or on the way it doesn't.' Feltus most often employs pose, stance, placement to create visual interest, although some works, such as Sylvia (19 1/2"x23 1/2":1999) do imply motion. In Sylvia, the woman is poised as to suggest impending flight -- an almost magnetic repulsion away from the pinned portrait and taped letter at her left. Art critic Brunetti however, summarized what gives "the implication of intimacy and the formal detachment of bodies" its greatest power in much of Feltus's art:
In The Painter and His Muse (2000), one sees the luminary contrasts which mould form: directional light and shadow are faint. An exquisite flow of line and contour is set in motion through the placement of the two figures: it is accentuated by the sketcher's upraised pencil, and further counterbalanced by the background chair filled with portfolios. The painter's gaze seems fixed on greater concerns beyond the image's bounds, while the presumed model/companion appears more self-absorbed. It fits our millennium -- a situational narrative without text or context. A viewer is drawn to supply a personal subtext. And it will be his own. In The Poet and His Muse (1999-2000), the composition seems to pull the woman from the poet: a linear flow towards the lower right exists in tension with the leftward orientation of the poet's gaze and the slightly more frontal turn of his muse's face. The pair forms a quiet nexus, while a viewer seeks a focus just beyond the image. Again, here is a painting which confronts the viewer with situation, rather than personalities. The 'telling details' which so often link Feltus' paintings add to the effect: about the figures are the letters, a painting reproduced on page, slippers, a domestic touch set aside for the moment. Works such as Alexandra's Mirror (37 1/2"x49":1999) or Fair August (59 1/4"x39 1/2":1999) evoke a similar sense: an intimation that a viewer is witnessing a private proscenium, but that the significant play of life is occurring elsewhere, off-stage. And so often in these paintings, the human form implies much, while the face, the vehicle of first impressions, reveals less. In their situations, rather than through specific portraiture, the paintings deeply access the instincts by which humans know that a face may feign, but the body still betrays. "Alan Feltus: New Paintings" at Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, does offer the visitor at least five smaller, single portraits. While excellently done, these do not create as deep an impression as the larger, situational images. Artists have at times sought to look back; restart; to explore alternatives to art as it has developed. One need only recall the English Pre-Raphaelites.... But they drew solely on technique; in content they seem today thoroughly Victorian in their concerns and sensibilities. Decorum, Claritas, Lume, pictographic situation and naturalistic reference, balanced compositional geometries, movement of line, mannered gesture and, although intimate, a Theatrum Mundi -- in all this, Feltus blends traits inspired by the early Italian Renaissance and modern sensibilities in a new manner. A viewer is strongly taken by his art. But this artist is not so wedded to any 'here and now.' Although it can never be a certainty, Alan Feltus's works seem likely to endure for innumerable generations to come. Feltus has gathered, as the poet once advocated, "from the air a live tradition... from a fine old eye the unconquered flame." Alan Feltus has made something new and fine. As writer Alan Bloom and poet W.H. Auden were wont to point out, traditions nourish those when the contemporary is unable to supply lively inspirations. Bloom, in The Closing of The American Mind observed: "The ages of great spiritual fertility are rare and provide nourishment for other less fertile ones." He added that for subsequent rare talents: "They provided the way out as well as the model for reform." Feltus has a rare talent. These new linens are masterful and engaging. Feltus renders what emerges beyond mind and emotions, nature and nurture, that entity now so unfashionable among many critics... the human soul. If one allows that something in the human eludes the psychologists, the theorists and the theologians, the claim is not so extravagant. I am comfortable with it,and am confident that after viewing the paintings a perceptive viewer will be also. Alan Feltus has brought forth an art which is familiar and personal, but which commands authority; an art which speaks to our time, and before which we grow silent and listen. This is an accomplishment. "Alan Feltus: New Paintings Oils on Linen," runs from April 28 through June 17, 2000, at Ann Nathan Gallery, 218 West Superior, Chicago, (Telephone: 312/ 664-6622). The work of Alan Feltus at the Ann Nathan Gallery can be viewed on line at http://hometown.aol.com/nathangall/index2.html A catalogue with an excellent preface by art critic John Brunetti has been issued. --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. Editor's Note: Many of the books mentioned in www.artscope.net are in print and may be purchased through this website's Barnes & Noble link. Paul Hill's The Light of Early Italian Painting (Yale University Press: 1987), and The Essential Gombrich, Phaidon: 1966) are highly recommended. |
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