Fritz Duffy. Artist.
 
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To You, Fritz,

it may feel that progress comes very slowly, but as a visitor, I was impressed by the amount of work, the way ideas about light and space have developed and how your prints have grown in confidence and technique.

I find the new work very moving, full of yearning for the evening light to last, to see further into the distance.

The work is rich and deep. You can look at it a long time. The feel for deep space - letting your eye travel further and further back, far, far, past rippling water, banks of distant trees, giant buildings miniaturised by distance, past broken lines of cloud, and brilliant sky. Deep space - deep in several senses. Things are opening up
in your work, you can see further.

When you said today, ‘They are what they are’, meaning, that the ambition in these wasn’t to blow apart the art world, that felt to me like an interesting, Buddhist-like acceptance. Without ambition, you make the most ambitious work. They are about saying something meaningful in the most appropriate way, in the
simplest way. That makes them real, true and personal.

Anyway, they certainly work for me.
Symbolic, atmospheric, inventive, brilliantly observed, glowing, emotive, specific images.

Sasha Leech
Artist & Teacher
2022

 

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A Visit to the Artist

To step into the artist’s studio, redolent with the aroma of paint, is to step into a mind uncovered. It is to be a privileged witness to the steady unfurling of thoughts and feelings, taking shape on canvas and paper, manifesting in forms, textures, colours.

You become aware of a stillness, akin to a chapel. Standing there, absorbing sights and smells, an emotion builds; you gaze at a canvas of a bleak Dungeness landscape, and within you there rises up tears you had not thought you’d brought with you, which spill out spontaneously, taking you by surprise.

How can this happen merely with the application of pigment to a surface? It is made with the marks of a hand that knows so much, has lived so much, which cannot be spoken, yet does speak to you, without need of words. These works establish a mysterious connection that, like music, bypasses the mind and reaches straight to the heart.

You wonder how it can be that you are still standing, and not felled in the face of these visions, bathed in twilight colours, animated by the artist’s touch. You are still standing but wiser. You know that all things end, and all things continue; and the dark that we attempt to hide from has an inner light all its own. And this we are now
able to acknowledge, thanks to the artist’s touch, passed on from one soul to another.

Colin Pink
Art Historian & Poet
2022

 

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Fritz Duffy, the art of mutability.

Leonardo da Vinci famously advised painters to stimulate their imagination through the contemplation of old walls:

…when you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones, if you have to devise some scene, you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes . . . you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces . . . And these appear on such walls confusedly, like the sound of bells in whose jangle you may find any name or word you choose to imagine.

Fritz Duffy gets his inspiration from noticing the everyday and overlooked in the streets of London. Fritz is fascinated by the multiple layers that old and often decaying objects present. His visual world is a palimpsest recording the traces left by time on the surface of our world. It is a world that is easily overlooked until it is brought before us, made fresh and fascinating, by the artist’s gaze.

His paintings of walls seem to float free from their white canvas background as if they might drift into the room from the surface on which they depend. They are both solid and immaterial at the same time. A rich residue of marks creates a surface that is itself an accumulated record of the task of looking and making; the layering of paint surfaces is loosely applied so that earlier passages show through the upper layers. These paintings are, despite their ostensible subjects, portraits of time. They are their own history of making and remind us of the passage of time that everything around us records. Fritz lovingly depicts the mutability of the material world, the way a wall acquires a patina of the various adaptations and assaults that it has sustained, in this way his work makes time visible to us in a new way.

Fritz’s paintings of icons (ancient and modern) remind us again of mutability. The masterpieces of the ancient world; a classical Greek statue of an athlete; a pre-historic fertility idol; an African bronze head, have travelled down through history to us now, often in a damaged state and divorced from their original context and function, but speak to us of the ideals of other ages and places. Often we do not know who the makers of these iconic objects were. The fame of these works outlasts their makers and are remnants of worlds that are largely lost to us.

Modern day icons, such as footballers David Beckham and Wayne Rooney, are also given the ‘icon’ treatment. Wayne Rooney is depicted gradually turning to stone as he is captured in a sports photograph after scoring a goal. The painting of Michelangelo’s statue of the biblical David (saviour of his people by slaying the giant Goliath) has the head of David Beckham. Michelangelo’s sculpture of the idealised masculine figure sits naturally with the publicity images of Beckham. There is wit here, but also, perhaps, a warning, a vanitas effect, familiar from still-life painting, that fame and life itself is transient and that all things must fade and decay. But this makes it sound as if Fritz’s paintings are a sobering experience whereas in fact they are a celebration and invite us to embrace our transience.

When I look at Fritz’s paintings I’m reminded of a line from the American poet, Wallace Stevens:

The poem is the cry of its occasion.

Each painting by Fritz Duffy is such a cry, a summons, a wake-up call and an invitation to look differently. There is something synaesthetic about Fritz’s paintings, a musical quality to his palette, a harmony of tones that move skilfully between different registers, with the assurance that a lifelong commitment to the handling of paint guarantees. The closer and longer one looks the more nuances one discovers, each with the shimmering quality of microtones in music.

Colin Pink
Art Historian & Poet
January 2012