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Walter Fydryck: Portraits
May 7 - June 1, 1999

Gourmand Coffeehouse
728 South Dearborn Street
Chicago, Illinois
312/ 427-2610

Walter Fydryck exhibits extensively and his showing at Charles Schabes Gallery was noted earlier in artscope.net, but his selection of new works at Gourmand Coffeehouse reveals some new explorations and further developments in direction which were implicit in previous work and which merit attentive notice. The Gourmand exhibition, on view from May 7th through June 1st, presents nine mid-sized panels and four small format pieces and this juxtaposition reflects two distinctive approaches in expression.

Two earlier works hung on the West wall, "Two Sides of Picasso" (1997) and "Pop Wizard [Andy Warhol" (1996), serve as a prologue to the other works and form a starting point by which to gauge the range of evolution of technique and style in Fydryck's art. The portrait of Warhol may also be viewed on the Museum of Modern Art website in conjunction with the show The Museum as Muse at http://www.stadiumweb.com/artworks/

Many of Fydryck's works rely upon the use of painting on lucite[TM] which is suspended over an underlying image layer and this essential feature makes them nearly impossible to convey in planar reproduction. It is a process he has developed and patented and these current works display a subtler and very integrated use of the fusing of pigment to the lucite[TM] surface. The palette of the recent midsize works recall the spirit of Art Deco and this collaborates particularly well with the stylized posing of the subjects. Fydryck's use of a sun or globus of light, the rays of which supply a unifying element to such pieces as "Too Responsive for His Own Good" (1994) or "The Pause" (1997) both on the North wall, further adds a Deco/Empire touch. What is particularly attractive is the interplay of light from the colored backing through the lucite image.

Some viewers have remarked that the series on the North wall in general tone recalls some of Japanese animation; a contemporary genre which also owes much to the earlier achievements of the Japanese print tradition. Certainly, Fydryck has developed a very deliberate and conscious stylization, one very much in harmony with graphic expression untouched by the Western Renaissance's discovery of perspective. In color scheme and in the posing of subject, the paintings bring to mind the late offshoots of Art Deco such as the a la egyptien. This technique seems well suited to the almost 'Freudian tableau' nature of the subject content.. One gains the impression that an Coptic scribe has adapted Art Deco to present a Freudian text. However ill in regard Freud's theorizations may presently be, his clinical observations remain acute and informative. But then, Greek tragedies may never have articulated a theory of human will or psychology, but their human drama remains strikingly to the mark, beyond all the tangential theories that are pasted into footnotes. And Frydryck's style focuses the viewer on the essential posture. It is the difference between art and exegesis.

In the final four paintings of the South wall, one finds the intensified application of one of Fydryck's stylistic repetoires; line accentuated with almost lithographic strokes of color shading. This technique harkens back to some of Braque, or of A.M.Cassandre, but with Fydryck it becomes almost vorticist in creating a dynamic rendering, even while the subject matter remains posed and static.

An exhibition by Walter Fydryck, and they occur regularly, is always worth seeing, and at this venue one can enjoy the opportunity over coffee or a meal. "Portraits" by Walter Fydryck is a chance to see the in-progress evolution of an interesting Chicago artist's work.

--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.