Rebecca Nemser

“It’s all com­ing from mem­o­ry,” says ROBERT FERRANDINI. “From fairy tales, from child­hood — from imag­in­ing. The way I see it, it’s the land­scape of the mind. Lots of land­scapes came to me from the movies. Fort Apache. Red Riv­er. Cheyenne Autumn. The Searchers. The idea of the search — which is what I do as a painter. I go into it. I search.”

ROBERT FERRANDINI’s ear­ly work fea­tured fly­ing saucers and mon­sters, imagery drawn from a 1950’s child­hood spent watch­ing sci­ence-fic­tion movies like When Worlds Col­lide and The Thing. In his new paint­ings of imag­i­nary land­scapes and seascapes, he has come to some kind of terms with his past and is ready to move on. His space­ship has final­ly land­ed in a world of his own making.

Yet there is exhil­a­ra­tion in the ter­ror, the ver­tig­i­nous fall. These speedy, vio­lent fan­tasies of destruc­tion and chaos are ten­der­ly, beau­ti­ful­ly described. The draw­ings in graphite and lin­seed oil – the oil used won­der­ful­ly as col­or – and the swirls of paint in eerie sea greens or fiery reds com­pose a bal­anced, painter­ly sur­face. The lan­guage of abstrac­tion pulls us upward, as the images plunge us into the abyss.