Nathalie Karg Gallery
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • Home
  • Artists
  • Exhibitions
  • Fairs
  • News
  • Publications
  • Cumulus Studios
  • Contact
Cart
0 items $
Checkout

Item added to cart

View cart & checkout
Continue shopping
Menu
  • Current
  • Past

But a Flag Has Flown Away: JOE FYFE

Past exhibition
4 January - 10 February 2019
  • Press release
  • Works
  • Installation Views
  • Publications
Press release

The title of the exhibition is meant to evoke materiality, lightness and distance, qualities important to my practice. It is a phrase taken from “Exiled Grace,” one of the poems in the book Calligrammes (1913-1916) by Guillaume Apollinaire, written while he was a soldier serving in World War I.

 

Each painting utilizes a poem from the book. Il Pleut came about capriciously. I imposed the Apollinaire poem over the variegated surface of the support. It felt cheeky to apply this beloved modernist poem–as important to literary history as art history–as an organizing motif for a painting.

 

When I finished the Il Pleut painting, I had to understand it. I thought of the Giorgio Agamben essay, “What is the Contemporary?” I had been wondering, how do you feel the present? How do you frame it? One of Agamben’s conclusions was that one must “transform the present, putting it in relation with other times.”

 

Soon after I discovered the Marxist cultural critic Mark Fisher, now deceased, who described in his book, Ghosts of My Life “the slow cancellation of the future” how neo-liberal capitalism has “systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new” resulting in art that tended towards “retrospection and pastiche.”

Similarly, perhaps, I have always tried to achieve something like stasis in my work, as if I had all the time in the world-like Baudelaire perusing the Salons-in opposition to the compulsive, purposeless dynamism of capitalism.

 

I wished not to prod nor distract the viewer, but to problematize the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. I sought an anachronistic relationship to the present as way of moving outside of history, or at least the panicked environment of hyper-consumerism, by refusing to over-stimulate the eye and by attempting to avoid the flourish.

 

Other aspects of the Calligrammes paintings have other precedents. Their compositions, for example, share something with French painter Claude Viallat, a big influence, whose own emphasis on materiality seems to conflate Matisse with Brecht, being both decorative and political. Viallat’s painted patterns are introduced over re-purposed objects often made from industrial or commercial fabrics.

 

Another conscious model for this series was the Robert Altman film, Short Cuts in which the plots of a half-dozen Raymond Carver stories are yanked from their Pacific Northwest settings and cobbled into an episodic narrative set in Los Angeles. Here, Altman demonstrated that to genuinely respect borrowed material you must be ruthless with it.

 

Apollinaire called himself “a traveling spectator of the world,”: the cloth, flags and signage that make up my surfaces have been collected during international travels. But I know very little French. So, even though I had translations at hand, my experience of painting the texts has been an appreciation of their appearance.

 

The 100th anniversary of the Armistice occurred just as I finished up this series. There is portrait of the Apollinaire by Picasso that serves as a frontispiece in the original edition, in which the poet is seen with a head wound wrapped in bandages. The canvas strips adhered to the surfaces of some of the paintings correspond to the bandages wrapped around Apollinaire’s head.

Works
  • JOE FYFE, TOUR EIFFEL, 2018
    JOE FYFE, TOUR EIFFEL, 2018

     

  • JOE FYFE, COEUR, COURONNE ET MIROIR, 2018
    JOE FYFE, COEUR, COURONNE ET MIROIR, 2018

     

  • JOE FYFE, PAYSAGE, 2018
    JOE FYFE, PAYSAGE, 2018

     

  • JOE FYFE,LA CRAVATE, 2018
    JOE FYFE,LA CRAVATE, 2018
  • JOE FYFE, IL PLEUT, 2018
     JOE FYFE, IL PLEUT, 2018
  • JOE FYFE,LOIN DU PIGEONNIER, 2018
    JOE FYFE,LOIN DU PIGEONNIER, 2018
  • JOE FYFE, COEUR COURONNE ET MIROIR, 2018
    JOE FYFE, COEUR COURONNE ET MIROIR, 2018
  • JOE FYFE,LA CRAVATE, 2018
    JOE FYFE,LA CRAVATE, 2018
  • JOE FYFE, LE JET D'EAU, 2018
    JOE FYFE, LE JET D'EAU, 2018

     

Installation Views
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation View Joe Fyfe Screenshot1
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation View Joe Fyfe Screenshot2
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation View Joe Fyfe Screenshot3
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation View Joe Fyfe Screenshot4
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation View Joe Fyfe Screenshot5
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation View Joe Fyfe Screenshot7
Publications
  • But a Flag has Flown Away

    But a Flag has Flown Away

    JOE FYFE 2018
    Paperback 36 pages
    Publisher: Nathalie Karg Gallery
    Dimensions: 8 x 5 1/2 in
    Read more
Back to Past exhibitions

Nathalie Karg Gallery 

 

127 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10013

Info@nathaliekarg.com

Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2025 Nathalie Karg Gallery
Site by Artlogic

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences