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DiggJames Farrelly: Recent Work
March 19, 2008- April 19, 2008
Reception: March 22, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
James Farrelly
Lohin Geduld Gallery
531 W 25th St James Farrelly Lazy Days (2007) |
James Farrelly is an American painter who has lived and worked in Brooklyn for the past eight years. His aesthetics and artistic voice, however, have been shaped to a great degree by his twenty-plus years of residence in Rome, Italy. A laconic Mediterranean sensibility pervades Farrelly’s work. Figures cavort and recreate on the beach, dazzled into a state of contentment and bliss by sun, sea, waves and sand. Simple gestures like playing with a ball or spreading out a towel become ritualistic movements, suggesting the timeless interplay of culture and nature.
Farrelly’s narratives play out like a Greek or Roman frieze, with bodies interwoven across the picture plane in slow motion choreography. Time stretches out in this world, evoking the prolonged stillness of Pompeian frescos or the late afternoon hours of a summer solstice. These classical tableaux are animated by Farrelly’s deft paint handling and use of saturated color. Through a great variety of scraping, layering and fluid drawing, Farrelly creates color relationships that elicit responses of sensuality and warmth. In this way he infuses his scenes with a visceral tactility. Bonnard and Matisse are major influences, as are the brightly hued Sienese paintings of the Quattrocento. The immediacy and participatory nature of these color shifts enliven Farrelly’s compositions, setting into motion recollections of past pleasures and future longings.
Farrelly spends each summer on Monte Argentario, a rocky promontory on the Tuscan coast. There he fills notebooks with drawings and watercolors while observing people enjoying the Tyrrhenian Sea. These initial impressions inform his painting process with a particular sense of space, light and place. To this he adds the weight of a European figurative tradition stretching from the Parthenon marbles to Cezanne’s bathers. Farrelly’s synthetic painting language extends this vocabulary into the present day. The results are richly rewarding images, filled with a theater of mythical display and spontaneous improvisation.
James Farrelly studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Urbino, Yale University, and the New York Studio School. He has shown at Rebecca Hossack Gallery in London and Graffiti Now Atelier in Verona and was the recipient of a fellowship at the Maryland Art Institute landscape program. His publications include solo exhibition catalog "One Summer"; drawings for "Un cappello pieno di vento," a book of poems published by Colpo di Fulmine Edizioni; and an edition of two prints and a poem for the series "Cartelle," published by Graffiti Now Atelier.
Art Reviews of James Farrelly: Recent Work
| The New York Sun April 17, 2008 | John Goodrich | "...Contours and colors fizz appealingly in these canvases; they have a kind of mute brilliance, thanks to a generality of description that simplifies gestures and reduces faces and hands to plots of color...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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