Barnaby Fitzgerald’s exhibition “An Eye For Ballast' at Dallas' Meadows Museum offers an unusually direct connection between the culture of Greco-Roman...
The artist’s paintings make the timeless world of mythology seem suddenly present and alive.Barnaby Fitzgerald’s exhibition “An Eye For Ballast,” comprising two dozen paintings made over the course of the last three decades, offers an unusually direct connection between the culture of Greco-Roman antiquity and the world of contemporary art.
Not only do viewers meet figures such as Io, Terpsichore and Trimalchio, who have stepped from their ancient myths onto Fitzgerald’s canvases, but also the sunlight and skies suggest those of Umbria, in central Italy, where the artist lived as a child and still maintains a studio.Like visiting Italy itself, spending time with Fitzgerald’s paintings makes the timeless world of mythology seem suddenly present and alive — an otherwise all-too-rare experience in modern culture.
In the metaphor that gives the exhibition its title, the eye is what steadies, or stabilizes, an artist throughout the odyssey of his or her life, much like the ballast or keel of a ship. The steadiness and consistency of Fitzgerald’s work proves the aptness of the title, and the solidity and strength of the paintings mean that they stay with a viewer long after leaving the show, like truly classical monuments.“Barnaby Fitzgerald: An Eye for Ballast” continues through Sept. 22.
Barnaby Fitzgerald's 2017 oil-on-linen work "Caesura" allegorizes the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event that Fitzgerald lived through as a fifth-grader in Italy., Special Contributor. Benjamin Lima is a Dallas-based art historian and the editor of Athenaeum Review, the University of Texas at Dallas journal of arts and ideas.
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