ABOUT A WINDOW

2013


Press Release for SOHO20 gallery:

About A Window is a careful dissection of a distinctive architectural interface. In a series of recent oil on wood panel paintings by Lisa Fischetti, the window, the unifying compositional motif, is considered with clean, minimalist precision. At once intimate and objective, Fischetti’s work articulates how various segments of the structure can serve to formally and allegorically alter our line of sight.

Fischetti examines how the construction of the window’s pane, shade, and frame can both extend and constrict the limits of what is observed. The grid, the fundamental building block of the structure, confines the view, but also proposes a sense of expansion. Evoking Ray and Charles Eame’s film Powers of Ten, Fischetti considers the window’s potential to demonstrate orders of magnitude. The structure acts as a lens, enabling the eye to zoom in, fragmenting and flattening a landscape, and to zoom out, presenting a swell of vastness.

There are also subtle details to be found within the painting’s minimalist quality. Fischetti does not seek to emancipate the grid but rather embraces it. Each piece is based off of a 7 x 7” square module; her palette cycles through five colors. Adhering to principles of standardization allows the less obvious to become increasingly more so. The negative space between each painting also has its own depth, confirming each work’s independent non-directional object hood, but also linking them together. While the work has sculptural dimensionality, it does not dismiss its skin of painterly flatness.