Don FreemanDon Freeman reaches back to the classical art of Italy and Greece and appropriates the madonna images and the perfect torsos of the statuary and settles them into new surroundings of the present age. It's a smooth relocation because Don Freeman's intention is not to exploit our familiarity with the past but to emphasize its permeation into our lives. He's interested in exploring the effects those ancient symbols of piety can still have over us. "We need history to say something about beauty," he says. Working in series, he very carefully layers acrylics and images over one another, often several times, to build up precise assemblages of a madonna, saint, or torso image and a geometric patterning to house it. Rather than being a stark contrasting of the harshness and cold qualities of geometry with the warm humaneness of the classical statue, surprisingly, it's a complimentary marriage. For geometry is just as familiar to us now as the carvings of the Italians and Greeks. Included in this show, his series "Madness and Civilization" continues his splitting of the personality of the image, altering the realm of their atmospheres. He takes what would ordinarily be background, a sky or color field, and relocates it next to the statue or icon image, creating a new psychological context for each. He makes us reevaluate the different set of feelings we bring to our contemplation of the exalted and the logical. And they begin to reassemble. (press release) |