Art Review: Reality rendered in vibrant colors

Joe Fyfe's "Markplatz," made of various fabrics, is among the artist's abstract works that show the influence of old signs and once-postered walls.

While abstract art in its character would not seem to be about "Real Things in the World" -- the title of Joe Fyfe's exhibition at David Lusk Gallery -- the artist reminds us that color and pattern and relationship are as real as oranges and mountains and that there are many ways of imitating nature and the works of human hands.

"Real Things in the World" is a small but impeccable exhibition that beautifully balances exuberant color with formal restraint and the seemingly random with the fastidious. Fyfe, a New Yorker showing in Memphis for the first time, employs common materials -- paper bags, felt, cotton towels and muslin, as well as crayon and watercolor -- to create works that contain strong graphic elements.

Joe Fyfe's "Markplatz," made of various fabrics, is among the artist's abstract works that show the influence of old signs and once-postered walls.

"Market Window," dyed cotton and dyed felt, by Joe Fyfe.

A clue to Fyfe's method lies in two of his color photographs included in the show. "Sisowath Quay" depicts a street vendor in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, leaning into a cart to get something for a girl standing with her back to the viewer. The vendor wears a teal shirt, pink slacks and a blue hat; the cart is orange, except where scraped-off paint reveals light blue patches; the girl wears a bright yellow shirt. The juxtaposition of these hues imposes a riot of sensation, a visual feast of incongruity. In "Basel Window #2," a display of multicolored, striped, checked and polka-dotted bedding dazzles the eye.

It takes no effort at all to turn from these photographs to large pieces like "Marktplatz" (54 by 64 inches), with its strips of red, orange and white-dotted fabric, or "I Primi" (36 by 51.5 inches), in which a bold vertical section of eggplant purple abuts a whimsical U-shape of red topped with yellow capitals surrounding what feels like a vast field of negative space created by a rectangle of unpainted muslin. Clearly we see here the influence of old, faded signage; of portions of walls that have held generations of posters and been scraped and painted again; of automobiles repainted in patchy pigments; of the color-blind concatenation of the world's fashions and furnishings.

In works like "Maroon Window" and "Large Window with Pink," the first composed of rectilinear patches of dyed cotton and felt, the second a more irregular assemblage of dyed cotton, felt and silk burlap, the resemblance to folk quilts seems deliberately to evoke a sense of modernist domesticity (what's more homey and comforting than a quilt?) while the references to windows imply a quality of architectural space reduced to its most fundamentally geometrical. We see nothing through these windows but ideas of windows, and even ideas of windows are "real things in the world."

Fyfe is at his most subtle in two collages of about 30 by 24 inches and two drawings of about 25 by 19 inches. The first two remind us that collage, or at least mixed media, in all its ramifications is the 20th century's most important contribution to the visual arts. Again leaving considerable space to speak for itself, Fyfe artfully and spontaneously uses scraps of cloth and paper and sprinkles of ethereal blue watercolor to assemble fields of activity that feel both urban and tranquilly Asian.

Even the utter simplicity and sparseness of the smaller abstract drawings offer exquisite evidence that, as poet William Carlos Williams wrote, "There are no ideas but in things."

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Joe Fyfe, "Real Things in the World," with Bruce Brainard, "Recent Paintings"

A reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. today at David Lusk Gallery, 4540 Poplar in Laurelwood. The exhibits run through March 27. Call 767-3800 for more information.

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