Painting is philosophy made incarnate, a sense of the world embodied in visual and material form. Painting is a guide to how we might relate to the world, as if it were a newly discovered land.
In Jeff Ferst’s paintings, we encounter a world that just won’t stop whirling and scintillating. More precisely, it is made of many worlds, arcing nodes that intersect with other circles to create a myriad of connections. Each world is a kind of sphere of influence, a locus of energy, but never existing independently of the entire matrix. It is that interplay that gives Ferst’s paintings their distinctive, playful musicality.
Essential to the paintings’ structure are the blocks of color that compose the curving circuitry. These blocks, themselves often inset with concentric squares, act like the tesserae of mosaics, simultaneously creating and deconstructing form. And they give the paintings a jewel-like quality, as if reflecting light from its complex surface.
Ferst adopts as his own a visual language derived from early modernism, particularly from Cubism, and from its ecstatic variant, Orphism. But he paints gesturally with thick pigment, and with a personal passion and energy. The structure of his “geometric landscapes” is distinctly organic, form generating form with an intuitive inner logic. The image of the garden appears as a specific subject, and as an apt metaphor for Ferst’s art. He seems to be working with wild energies, and like a gardener shaping these impulses into a new state that is a melding of the natural and the aesthetic.
Within the complex fields that Ferst paints, images begin to appear. They are in a sense camouflaged, or encoded with the larger structure. An arc becomes a snake, a head appears in the overlapping of curves, faces peek from free-floating circles. Whole figures are apparent, and we become aware that Ferst’s paintings teem with people or at least the evocations of individuals. We start to see the spinning worlds of his paintings as intersecting pyches, memories and spirits.
Color plays a powerful role in these works, energizing and organizing our vision. Ferst’s hues are often intense, playing warm against cool, creating a pulsing visual experience. But he also allows olive, putty, rusty plum and other lower saturation colors to contrast with the higher key tones around them. The artist seems to be showing us something about an emotional undertow that coexists in the world along with the feelings of pleasure and joy.
John Mendelsohn
