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Alan Feltus’s contemporary classicism is rooted in his love of the Italian Renaissance, but his paintings are tinged with a melancholy that seems both modern and timeless. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1943, he has lived in Italy since 1987. His subjects are figures—most often but not always a pair–in simplified interiors, which are stripped down almost to the point of geometry yet retain a hold on the conventions of illusionistic space. Faces, male or female, have a stylized family resemblance, often with dark hair, downturned mouths and sideways glances; limbs are almost sculpturally smooth and characteristically bent into intriguing puzzlelike patterns. New oil-on-linen paintings exploring formal and psychological permutations of this milieu are on view at the Forum Gallery in New York City, October 21–December 3, 2005. There are hints of myth and allegory in some of the work in the current exhibition. The trio of women in the Le Sorelle (2005)—the title is taken from the Italian for sisters—could be muses or norns or fates. They are more tightly grouped than is usual in Feltus’s work. The darkest
haired of the three woman, seated on a low couch, leans on a table with folded arms and tilted head, like a pensive Jane Morris in a Rossetti painting. But the composition’s spatial ambiguity makes it look as if she were sitting in the lap of the woman behind her, a configuration familiar from Leonardo’s Madonna and St. Anne (c. 1503–13). The third woman, sitting spread-legged on a chair beside them, holds a sheet of paper in each hand; she could be a kind of annunciatory angel. The duo in Mute Sirens (2004), sitting not quite side-by-side in rudimentary chairs, suggest two aspects of an enigmatic quality, like Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (1514). Feltus is drawn to these enigmatic dyads, which suggest uncanny doppelgängers or relationships with complex backstories. Here, one woman is bare-legged and wears a simple white shift; the other—in a long-sleeved red dress, green stockings and brown shoes—holds a tightly folded piece of white paper. In Feltus’s paintings unspecified narratives hover in the air, and the inhabitants seem lost in their own separate worlds of memory. Elaborate iconographic schemes provided a context for Renaissance art work. Feltus’s fictional spaces are closer to the domestic arrangements of the twentieth-century painter Balthus. The title As Though by Themselves (2003) exemplifies the intimate yet distanced relationships he likes to depict. One woman sits on a chair, a manuscript in her hand; the other crouches on the floor, her arms on a low table covered with papers. Together, the zig-zag shapes of bended knees and elbows coalesce into a strong formal shape, yet there is no eye contact. Perhaps this disconnect is a reminder that, however close the relationship, the privacy of individual thought is inviolable. The theme is continued in Morning Mail (2004), where a man stands drinking coffee while a woman, seated, turns away, a letter in her hand. The Italian countryside framed behind them commands a doubletake; it’s a painting but suggests a window view.
Feltus’s allusions to the artist’s life occasionally become explicit. Studio Days (2004) initially appears to depict an artist and his nearly nude model. Yet he does not look at the woman who is folded with elegant gaucherie across the foreground; instead, he applies paint to a canvas seen as a sliver at the far edge of the image. His arm and brush are as straight as the line the bisecting the two-color wall behind them. The woman holds a pencil, as if to write on the scrap of paper held against her thigh; a second sheet rests under her other hand. A landscape painting on an easel plays Magritte-like tricks with our perceptions. The naked and the clothed appear again in 2004 Summer (2004), where one figure reclines on a low divan while the other, seated, holds a white cup. The matching saucer, along with a companion cup, rest on a chair. The seated figure carries another of those mysterious notes ubiquitous in the artist’s work. The sparse furnishings—plain green or brown chairs, the divan draped in neatly pleated white cloth, the truncated form of a wardrobe door open at an angle—function as perspective scaffolding. The two figures gaze off in opposite directions, regarding something beyond the edges of the canvas, lost in their own imaginations. Feltus is an artist of interior life, in both a physical and a psychological sense. The clarity with which he outlines his shapes, the soft harmony of his colors and the formal logic of his compositions veil human emotions as deep as they are still. Forum Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10151. Telephone (212)355-4545. www.forumgallery.com Originally printed in American Arts Quarterly, Volume 22, number 4. |
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