A Quiet, Ominous World

You may well stand awestruck when you first see Warner Friedman’s powerful paintings at Kent’s splendid Morrison Gallery. These carefully thought out — almost engineered — big canvasses are at home in the seemingly endless, light-filled space with its soft, hand-polished pale floors.  And they comprise a truly important show.

   Friedman’s education as an engineer and designer at Pratt and Cooper Union informs his current work: mostly landscapes seen through manmade structural elements. But that does little justice to the dimension and depth he achieves in the picture plane and to the varied interpretations he leaves to the viewer.

   Almost every painting fools the eye into a three-dimensional experience. Friedman achieves this optical illusion in both physical and painterly ways.  Some of his canvasses are shaped like open books with distinct left and right “pagesâ€� flaring from the center. Others are trapezoids that achieve the same angled, 3-D view.  The opposing images — structured versus natural — move toward the center  and pull you in deep.  

   Then, too, he uses light and shades of shadow to achieve depth. The fluting on one square porch column (“The White Pineâ€�) looked so real that I surreptitiously touched it to see if he had layered one piece of canvas onto another.

     Clearly Friedman is making statements about man and nature, but the statements can be seen as invitational (“Come off the porch and enter the fieldsâ€�) or forbidding (“ Look at the barriers you have built between yourself and natureâ€�). Always they lure you into a near meditative reverie, sometimes with calming results, sometimes with alarming realizations.

   The first painting in the show, “Nineteen Seventy-two,â€� juxtaposes a cemetery seen through a gate on the left with a black and white abstract on the right in the pages-of-a-book format.  The graveyard stretches away compellingly while the abstract jolts us to stay here.  A beach and ocean is seen from underneath a lifeguard station. The sand and water invite, but there is no way out through the barrier slats.

   In “Sanctuary,â€� an idyllic lake is seen through a three-sided metal box made of green, round bars.

   “The Red Gateâ€� bars you from a dusty road leading to trees and distant hills. The gate is an emphatic red. A brightly lighted porch provides a view of a night sky with a crescent moon in “Night Porchâ€�:  You can look at the sky but you can’t get there.  

   Then there are some pictures of strong, white geometric forms—seemingly wooden — protecting cerulean skies. Emphatic, manmade structures juxtaposed against the infinite. The weight and dimensions of the forms are palpable; the skies unobtainable.

   Off to the right and behind the big paintings is a group of 1981acrylics on small museum boards, “modelsâ€� as Friedman calls them, for large paintings he executed and sold in the same year.  They are wonderful, colorful engineered abstracts that charm.

   Description cannot do justice to these paintings. The careful detail, hint of surrealism, strict formalism and manipulation of a master painter’s skills create a powerful, quiet, sometimes ominous world that must be seen and experienced.

   The Warner Friedman exhibition is at the Morrison Gallery, 8 Old Barn Road, Kent, through May 16.

Prices range from $1,200 to $74,000.  The gallery is open Wed. to Sat., 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Sun., 1-4 p.m.  Call 860-927-4501.