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Walter A. Fydryck
Drawings, Painting/Drawings
March 4 - April 30, 1999
Mon. - Fri, Noon-5 PM

Schabes Gallery
3810 North Clark Street
Chicago, Illinois 60613
Telephone: 773/ 281-5550

"Pure Art For Now People." Such is the motto which Charles Schabes chose for the Schabes Studio & Gallery at 3810 North Clark Street, Chicago. The current exhibition of 34 drawings and two paintings by Walter A, Fydryck accommodates the motto well. Fydryck's are very much grounded in Twentieth Century America: It is L'art pour l'art, and very much "now," and in subtle, fundamental ways. Fydryck, a Chicago artist, is tireless in pursuing his art, and exhibits widely. The works attract patrons and comment. There are definite reasons for this.

Ortega y Gasset observed: "'Modern' is what is 'in the fashion,' that is to say, the new fashion..." Why does that observation slip into mind whenever "now" or "happening" get used as an adjective? Well...

"...much magazine and newspaper illustration of the middle to late seventies was indistinguishable from gallery art. The demise of abstract expressionism in the late fifties caused a redefinition of modernism, which resulted in the revival and glorification of many approaches formerly considered to be retrograde. In the sixties, pop art was a celebration of commercial art as a cultural linchpin. In the seventies, photorealism and superrealism were returns to methodologies employed by illustrators of the fifties. The embracing of narrative, symbolic and representational easel art signaled an acceptance of a universal art vocabulary in illustration as well."

Woman with Stud, 1996 21 1/4" H x 16" W Colored pencil ink wash over photo process paper © Walter Fydryck

That is the observation of Stephen Heller, who edited Innovators of American Illustration (Van Nostrand Reinhold: 1986).

There has always been mutual influence and cross-fertilization between "Fine" and "Applied" art: Michelangelo did churches, Rubens illustrated books, Raoul Dufy, De Chirico and Salvador Dali even did graphic work for Conde Nast's Vogue in the late 1930s. "Fine" and "Commercial" art are primarily 19th century distinctions -- for most of history, art was either commissioned or not. The professionals borrowed from popular art, and folk arts took from the fine. And patrons bought, often that the populace might see -- in the squares, in the churches and in the manor. What has all this to do with Walter Fydryck's art? Today there is Fine Art. And democracy is essentially middle-class. A moment, please.

Pop art, by definition, drew from commercial graphics. But -- Pop art was self-consciously campy: reworking the work of others to elevate it into "Fine Art." And it was frequently a bit of fun, while it was in fashion, i.e. "Modern." But that "now" was then. Chicago even had its own version, the Hairy Who and other coteries much by the media and art world alike. And what has this to do with Walter Fydryck's art?

Walter Fydryck's art takes to heart and practices what they preached in theory and taxidermied in practice. His artistic expression internalizes the techniques and explores the media of mass communication art and brings it to symbolize and present his response with the Twentieth Century American experience. It is his individuality and it speaks the "now" without quotes. Frydryck, for better or not, reflects his environment and Zeitgeist. The content is pure Fydryck; the form is that of popular visual technique. A Fydryck painting or drawing is instantly recognizable as such and very accessible in image.

Fydryck is "now," and there are limitations in that. His style and expression does owe much to mass culture, and mass culture expresses and appeals to society's common denominators. Alexis De Tocqueville over two hundred years ago prophetically foresaw that, in democracies, the mass of citizens would ultimately retreat from public and, as well, spiritual, concerns into their immediate and personal preoccupations. Some of Twentieth Century America's most expert and unique contributions have been the soap opera and comics. Prosperity and security abet this. One thinks of the 17th Century Dutch and their genre paintings, the French Impressionists; the focus is on private lives and the commonplace of everyday. Cafes and indoor socials replace Sistine ceilings and human panoramas, and transcendent questions.

Walter Fydryck at Schabes Studio & Gallery exhibits, among several, a particular series: "Life Spirits," "Arena of Life" (1998), and "Anticipated Moment" (1999). These consists of acrylic fused into plexiglass and mounted over colored pencil renderings on ink wash. This is executed on photo process paper, which creates a frottage effect on the image ground. The three above pieces average about 20" high by 20" wide. The actual impression of the works, with their shifting dimensionality of plexiglass overimage, is eye-catching, even striking. The plexiglass overimage distinguishes them from a selection of drawings of which "The Prophecy" (1999) and "After The Fact" (1998) are representative.

It is not an exact correspondence but the style calls to mind some of the "New Wave" graphic work of artists such as Barbara Nessem; particularly her use of linework and sparse shadowing in works such as her portrait of Gloria Steinem for the Dutch edition of that author's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Revelations. Although Fydryck has built his style from his own experiments (he has even patented a technique for fusing pigments to plexiglass), the work is infused with an ambient popular sensibility which recalls the Conde Nast stable of artists during the Twenties and Thirties. There is a freer, less precociously stylized rendering, but one does sense a feel which animated Georges Lapape, Eduardo Benito, Harriet Meserole, Bolin in the Vogue Twenties and Thirties, an approach sometimes found today in "The Atlantic Monthly," or "The New Yorker" art. The Conde Nast legacy made full and conscious homage to Brancusi, Modigliani, Matisse, and artists such as Leon Bakst, Georges Barbier and Erte translated the gallery art of their times to the mass media. Walter Fydryck in many ways seems to inherit and further the melding of such currents in a manner that is contemporary and benefits from the Post-WWII art activity. If at times a particular drawings seems to suggest Joan Miro Meets Mary Worth, or Kandinsky Hails Winsor McKay, it is the viewer's visceral reaction to the pure art and the "now" that suffuse Fydryck's work.

Walter Fydryck also includes a Schabes Gallery a series of visual pun drawings, of which "Cat Scan" (1994} and "Woman With Stud" (1996) are representative.

Finally, the showing at Schabes Studio & Gallery offers a full selection of Walter Fydryck's flower series and these display a surrealistic, almost "Alice in Wonderland"-like serialization of the interpersonal relationships of anthropomorphic flora.

The artist will also show in "Space & Expression," a two-man exhibition of paintings and drawings, together with Sean Sauer, at the Contemporary Art Workshop, 542 West Grant Place, Chicago, Illinois 60614, Telephone: 773/ 472-4004. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday 12:30 - 5:30 PM.

--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.