Stare | Ferle
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Z Gallery Arts 102-1688 West 1st Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V6J 1G1
Ferle, "Torso #11," 2017
Artist Reception:Thursday, Sept 20th, 2018, 6PM - 8PM
Stare | Ferle
A myriad of small black spots draws the shadow of bodies without faces. These bodies could have been found in the bottom of a forgotten cave, engraved where the rock has previously kept it. The water seems to have dripped on these granular skins, leaving them the full extent of an impression that never runs out.
This link to time is certainly one of the specificities of the Torso series. As if Ferle's painting had wanted to ignore any chronology. These bodies are those of the Greek god moulded in marble that ancient Greece erected in beauty canons centuries ago. They are the classic nudes that history painting has staged. But they are also a nod to a much more recent production that directly questions the flesh as can be done by Georg Baselitz or Francis Bacon.
As suspended in weightless, they could be the body of all. And yet, free, unruly, scattered, scattered, they contain something inhuman, impalpable that makes them mysterious, almost disturbing.
Ink splashes, they sometimes share space with dark geometric pieces. As if to recall the endless places that the artist paints on gigantic canvases. As if to evoke landscapes with a dark horizon in which it is easy to get lost. Benches of dark earth, blocks of gray sky, stretches of asphalt, everything seems, in Ferle, unalterable. - Sandra Barre, art critic