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 2008
Milan,
Gallery Vittorio Emanuele II, Bocca
Boookshop
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Open exhibition booklet
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The work of Fred Charap is a reflection of a deeply hidden interiority, therefore a realization of the otherwise inexpressible, and yet it participates in the communally timeless search for meaning in identity, of a man, of a people --- the Jewish people. For Fred, in fact, the picture plane is a psychic spatialization, a depository of conscious and unconscious recognitions and drives: all the agony and joy, the expectation and the silence, rooted there, branches forth. The picture plane as wall, then, understood as blockage, --- or better yet, as mirror, upon which to project the cinema of one’s life. In this sense, Fred’s canvas is his desert, a site to re-find himself, to lighten himself of excess baggage, laying it down with concentrated care. Painting then becomes an arduous act of teknè, within whose desert the singular guide and teacher is Torah. Thus matter wraps itself in viscous layers of heated tonalities, creating an intense play of fullness and void, both unexpected and harmonic. Nothing is left to chance; the effect produced by an almost monochrome application of color is completely balanced and controlled. And so his pictorial language expresses itself in minutely detailed stratifications of sediment, a tangled tale with an indelible imprint. The point is that for Fred as a Jew, the temporal cannot eradicate that eternal fil rouge of continuity with History, life’s teacher and indisputable witness, that now in the speculative cavern of Art lives again in symbolic garb, in a strange semiotic objecthood which never touches upon the figurative and remains covertly, prodigiously, personal. As the genre of Abstraction would have it, Fred’s paintings invite each of us to re-examine his own path, to navigate his own interior depth. Born to a polysemic culture, child of diverse origins,---Russian by way of his immigrant Jewish parents, American by upbringing, --- Fred dissects their idioms through his work. And so finally it is in those fine threads, in the subtle bas-relief that draws the eye to trace their journey, that the essence of Fred Charap’s art lies. It contains, moreover, the perennial desire, the constant query of the Jew: my life as a stranger in a land not my own has covered twisted ways and paths, the artist would say, and beyond that wall, beyond eternity, what lies there?
May we each find our own response!
Antonio D’Amico
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Open exhibition booklet
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