November/December 2000

For decades, before succumbing to what he calls "the irresistible challenge to explore digital art," John Fischer was the most tactile of artists, a painter and sculptor for whom direct physical contact with his materials was a primary motivator. In his long and varied exhibition history, Fischer has attracted attention and created controversy with his chameleon-like ability to change his aesthetic persona and come up with surprising and sometimes shocking results.

Although he has also been an action painter, a creator of energetic and lyrical abstract canvases composed with stains and impastos of hurled paint, Fischer is perhaps best known for creating sculptures with bread. In 1964 he had a much publicized exhibition at the Allen Stone Gallery featuring sculptures made from bagels, pumpernickel loaves, and other bread products preserved with epoxy resin, which were hailed by Art News as "serious, even elegant" and likened by Arts magazine to the still lifes of Chardin.

In that phase, Fischer – who also staged public "bread events" that were covered by the New York Times and whose avant-garde notoriety led to three appearances on the Johnny Carson Show – said of his unusual medium, "There’s an expressive release in molding it – like working in clay or plaster. And you’d be surprised – I find smashing bread tremendously cathartic."

While one would think that a man once so attracted to the physical process of art-making might find working with computer-generated imagery somewhat wanting in tactile terms, the digital art of John Fischer turns out to be fully as sensual as his action paintings and bread sculptures, in his exhibition "Electronic Paintings" at Viridian Artists, Inc., 24 West 57 Street, from November 28 through December 16.

Fischer, who recently returned to the New York gallery scene after spending twenty years in Europe, where he exhibited widely in prestigious galleries and museums, believes that "the computer is new on the scene in the same way that the video explosion was fifty or so years ago." His recent work, says Fischer, who considers David Em, Marilyn Schwartz, and Manfred Mohr his peers, is "about beauty and vibrant musical color, geometry and bio-energy interfacing freely in a virtual realm."

The digital images in Fischer’s first New York exhibition in two decades, realized as Iris prints on large sheets of handmade paper, are compositionally complex and coloristically lush. Unlike the work of many other artists who create with computes, they are distinguished by genuine painterly qualities that one normally associates with more traditional mediums such as oils or acrylics.

The Iris print entitled "Interface/Inyourface/Innerface," for example, combines rigid geometric color areas, flowing organic shapes, and figurative imagery in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Francis Bacon. Although Fischer’s imagery is by no means as grotesque as that of the famous British painter, here he creates a similarly disconcerting effect with the photographically-derived face of a man, aswarm with garishly glowing fluorescent hues, suspended above a large rectangle in which livid swirls suggest an x-ray of radioactive entrails. Set emblematically within a segmented theatrical space enlivened by areas of light and shadow, these suggestive elements reflect the artist’s recent statement that his work" speaks of the secret self and the paradoxical fact that the moment it’s uniqueness is identified it becomes abstract and by necessity seeks communication with the rest of the world."

Here, the difficulty of that communication is made manifest in the figure’s isolation within a geometrical setting that suggests a kind of cage, even as the artist himself is liberated by a technology that he has stated is "more immediately responsive to the actions of the mind" than traditional painting. At the same time, it is precisely their relationship to traditional painting that makes Fischer’s electronic paintings more appealing than most other digital art.

Another fine example of this is the Iris print on handmade paper entitled "CD-017," with its juicy red and green hues so richly manipulated to approximate the viscosity of actual oil pigments and its bold abstract composition of variegated granular strokes juxtaposed with broad diagonal stripes and an oval shape suggesting the circular dance of a Zen master’s brush. In this piece, particularly, Fischer returns to his gestural roots, demonstrating the domestication of his cool new medium through the overriding pressure of a passionate sensibility, achieving in the process a painterly "handwriting" akin to Franz Kline or Robert Motherwell.

This is no small victory in a medium which resists the personal gesture with its slippery sleekness, its ghostly ethereality. For Fischer, the computer screen would seem a "starry cosmos" to borrow a phrase from one of Ginsberg’s poems, a realm of infinite mystery and possibility.

Another digital painting, "Rosch #5," goes beyond the virtual into a more literal tactility, given its medium: inkjet on vinyl, which automatically brings more tangible material elements into play along with digital imagery. Here, a network of black lines and blots simultaneously recalling Jackson Pollack’s drips, the stain painting of Helen Frankenthaler, and the suggestive inkblobs of a Rorschach test (one which might be interpreted by someone with a certain turn of mind as either an insect or an extraterrestrial) is superimposed over vibrant marbleized Day-Glo swirls reminiscent for their intricacy of nineteen-sixties psychedelia.

Reveling in the possibilities of his new medium with an enthusiasm which can be quite contagious for the new viewer, Fischer appropriates such retro-imagery unabashedly, as fodder for his arsenal of special effect, turning it to his own purposes with conceptually intriguing and aesthetically pleasing results. His playfulness is especially rewarding in the series of Iris prints on Japanese paper that he calls "Nine Spherical Entities," each unit of which is thirty-six inches square and conceived to be exhibited in a gridded installation measuring ten by ten feet. Here, each composition features a central circle which is altered in various ways through the digital manipulation of color and pattern. In some of the panels, the central globe retains its spherical integrity, while in others the colors and patterns of the background intrude into its borders to alter or even erode its contours in various ways. In this powerful and monumental installation, John Fischer employs the simplest and most pregnant of basic symbols to suggest a virtual universe of ideas – not the least of which is the effect of science and technology on the future visual culture.

Fischer, a vocal champion of digital art, as well as one of its most innovative exponents, claims that the new art form "has created a distinct visual language that permits fine art practitioners to enlarge their color vocabulary, to find new ways to transform reality, to create surreal and abstract space that is dramatically brilliant and amazingly creative." While some see digital art as "both a disappointment and a threat," according to Fischer, that perception will change, he vows, as a result his own efforts and those of other pioneers in the field.

John Fischer’s ambition, it would appear, is to be in the forefront of the coming revolution in art and technology. And with this exhibition he seems well on his way to achieving that goal.

- Maurice Taplinger