Painted Rock shows a painted rock in the center of the canvas. It is painted many different patches of color, a little randomly. Red, yellow, green, green-grey, white, violet. We see the dimension of the rock because the red changes in saturation from the top to the side. It is more saturated on the side, which is surprising. The colors feel random. The rocks feels a little unsteady on the canvas. The horizon is slanted towards the right arriving at mid-center. The rock throws three shadows that circle outward on the light neutral-colored ground on the lower right. It is as if a small rock was thrown into water and these are the ripples.
In the printed booklet that accompanies Francesca Fuchs’ most recent exhibit, how it rock is all about surface (at Inman Gallery through March 12), there are no photos of artwork, none of the usual features one finds in a catalog. No dimensions, no media info, no date. Just a title and a short prose description if the work. The paragraph at the beginning of this review is Fuchs description of Painted Rock, shown above. When I saw this, I thought of an activity where one person describes something and the second person has to draw it. I was at a house party about 30 years ago and we played a variation on the game of “telephone” where the first person drew a picture, the second person wrote a description of what was drawn, the third person draws a new picture based on the written description, etc. It was quite amusing how much the image changed as it went from person to person. Fuchs’ catalog for how a rock is all about surface would be a good start for such a party game.
But while the catalog consists of descriptions of each piece in the exhibit, this review will show photos of each piece. But I want to warn readers in advance—these photos have been color-corrected to the max. The warm, orange light of Inman Gallery has been electronically corrected. How true this is to the paintings themselves is hard to say, but at least the reproductions seem to match the written descriptions pretty well.
Fuchs’ work is a challenge to photograph. The paintings have a washed-out look. There are not great distinctions in light and dark—Fuchs avoids heavy-duty chiaroscuro. She also avoids sharp distinctions of color. Her paintings are unassuming. They are relatively small. They are easy not to notice. Hanging is a visually busy room would render her paintings largely invisible.
Fortunately, how a rock is all about surface is a small show of seven pieces total, two of which are modest ceramic cups, in their own gallery. It is the perfect environment to view these works.
Interestingly, all these paintings are of smallish objects sitting on a white surface. The two cups are somewhat rough-hewn and glazed with very visible brush-strokes. As a consequence, my photos of the cups sitting on their white shelves look a lot like the paintings.
By isolating the objects she paints, Fuchs is telling us that they are important. But they mostly are somewhat mundane objects. A painted rock, an unpainted rock, a cheesy ashtray. But two of the paintings have a human dimension. Kore figures were early classical Greek sculptures of women, and the subject of Fuchs’ painting, Kore, is a plaster cast of a Kore figure’s head. Fuchs describes it as “a young adult. It could be male or female.” According to my scholarly source, Wikipedia, Kore figures are all female, but perhaps Fuchs is commenting on the ambiguity of the face. (We can’t see the body, which might settle the issue.)
The other somewhat disturbing image is Transformer. It appears to be the shoulders and head of a doll, but Fuchs describes it as a “sculpture” made by someone named “Oscar.” The way that the face of the figure is asymmetric is a little disturbing. The figure’s left eye and cheek is dark red. It looks as if the figure has been attacked.
I want to challenge readers who get a copy pf the pamphlet that accompanies how a rock is all about surface to try to make images based on Fuchs’ description. I would love to publish them side by side with images of Fuchs’ paintings.