John Fischer
"Electronic Paintings"
November 28 - December 16, 2000

VIRIDIAN Artists is pleased to present a showcase exhibit of “Electronic Paintings” by John Fischer. This will be a return to the New York Art Scene for the artist after an absence of twenty years. During the interim, Fischer has been showing his art in Europe. This exhibit showcases many of the fifty or so works exhibited in a retrospective earlier this year at the Susquehanna University's Lore Degenstein Gallery.

Fischer was introduced to computer art in the late 70’s. Unafraid to forego the pigments of traditional painting, Fischer's digital art has incorporated his aesthetic vision into the native vocabulary of digital images. He prefers creating abstract images from scratch rather than trasforming scanned images. These computer generated images are a departure into the future of visual expression, a “color renaissance” that brings a vivid vocabulary to painting. The work is output on archival paper (or on vinyl) and ranges from six foot by four feet down to fourteen x seventeen inches.

About computers the artist states: ‘... Digital art offers a limitless and irresistible universe that frees my imagination. It seems that at every turn another set of possibilities re-create enthusiasm for visual art...”

About content the artist states: “ ...My work speaks of the secret self and the paradoxical fact that the moment its uniqueness is identified, it becomes abstract and by necessity seeks communication with the rest of the world.” Fischer feels digital technology has created a distinct visual language that permits artists to find new ways to transform reality and that digital art, like photography, has been raised to the status of fine art.

Known in the sixties as the “Breadman”, Fischer has long been a creative innovator, making a deep impact with sculptures combining bread, tools and other objects at Allan Stone in 1964. In 1967 the artist was invited to be in a traveling group exhibit of Jewelry by Contemporary Painters and Sculptors at the Museum of Modern Art. (Pretzel Necklace) In the mid seventies his work was featured in a museum wide solo exhibit of “Portraits of Self”, site specific installations of Bread Sculpture and a Loafers Festival. (Everson, 1972).

The Lerner Heller Gallery presented his large paintings in 1974. A fifteen year retrospective at the Schloss Hardenberg in Koln, Germany in 1983 featured “Portraits of Self” and the Horizontal Extensions of Scrolls, large paintings and works on paper, all of which developed and refined the bio-energy trace line he calls the “Line of Lines”. Since then Fischer has continued his purest form of “Line of Lines”, in graphite on paper and has translated his aesthetic vision into computer and video images. Two videos that combine his musical and visual outpourings will be shown during this exhibit: “Color Renaissance” and “NY/Geneva Faces”

Regardless of the media in which Fischer is immersed, he has always been both an innovator and pioneer. Most importantly, there is a consistency of aesthetic content that binds the work from the earliest bread sculpture to the “Electronic Paintings” of today.

You may contact the gallery director by phone at 212 245 2882 or by email at ncognito@earthfire.org

Key Words: Electronic paintings, computer art, digital art, The Line of Lines, Color Renaissance, Bread Sculptures, pioneer