“Camera Obscura: The Brooklyn Bridge in Bedroom,” by Boston-based artist Abelardo Morell, in the show “Seeing Is Not Believing: Ambiguity in Photography,’’ now at the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester, N.H.
The gallery says:
“This exhibition explores photographs that make us question what we are looking at. Still lifes, abstract images, and manipulated photographs heighten our sense of wonder. Can we ever trust what we see in a photograph?’’
Left, Abelardo Morell’s “Paint #16” (photo). Right: Anthony Fisher’s “The Light of Day” (oil on canvas), in their joint show “Two of a Kind: Abelardo Morell and Anthony Fisher,” at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth Art Gallery, at its Star Store Campus, in downtown New Bedford, Feb. 10-March 20.
The gallery says:
“This exhibition presents two creative approaches that focus on the abstract image – Abelardo Morell’s incredibly lush and sensual photographs of fresh paint frozen in time with the help of light, fast exposure and flash, and Anthony Fisher’s ingeniously captured lines and shapes featured on layered, monochromatic abstract paintings.
Both Morell and Fisher share a restless urgency to invent novel ways to play with traditional media, subjects, and methods. In their respective studios in the same creative community just outside of Boston, each pours his unique experimentation into their own patient and carefully crafted process. Results sometimes arrive as wonderful surprises transformed into bold work that the visitor can almost enter – inspiring, open minded, and deeply creative.’ Abelardo Morell admires Anthony’s work because he, ‘like me, thinks a lot about how a picture is made. Subject matter for him is, of course, important, but it is within his working process that the subject emerges. Anthony has used all sorts of devices to make marks on the canvas – perhaps to get his ego out of the way a bit.’
“Anthony Fisher’s studio process involves quirky and lumbering invented tools, physical struggle, gravity, chemistry, and physics to allow hundreds of marks to be thrown onto a canvas all at once. ‘My process is specifically designed for EXCESS – with so many visual ideas emerging at once, the overwhelmingly vast majority are discarded. I want the unexpected. My goal is to spark ideas that otherwise wouldn’t appear with a more deliberative, considered approach,’ says Fisher.’’
Abelardo Morell explains his admiration for the subject matter of his photographs, “When I visit museums, my eyes often take me first to the painting galleries. I marvel at the surfaces of paintings, which contain their own visual dramas, often independent of any narrative or formal aspect of the work. A difference between us as a photographer and painter is that photographers normally start with the world, while painters begin with a blank canvas and end up at times with astonishing creations.” Morell’s photographs show “that substance on its way to drying – a stage that finished paintings can never retain. “I also use other lighting sources pointed at a low angle to increase the raking light effects on the thick paint surface. I like the translucent and geometric visual marriages achieved through this method. Because what I am making are not ‘paintings’ in their own right, I am able to quote and crop discrete small paint details to make them play a big role in the final picture.”
Created specifically for this exhibition and presented at the gallery’s entrance is another visual surprise that underlines the connection between these two artists, neighbors and friends – a photograph of Abelardo Morell titled, “Paint: After Anthony Fisher’s 2021 Painting ‘Some Will Still Be Standing’, 2022” right next to the actual paintin
William Street, New Bedford, in the old “Whaling Capital’s’’ 19th Century section.
— Photo by PenitentWhaler
