Java.Dec.2017-pages

AILEEN FRICK’S MAN + MAN
Is a Reminder That the World Is Still a
Beautiful Place
By Ashley Naftule
“The world’s not that bad of a place,” painter Aileen
Frick says on the phone. “If you turn off the news
and look at the people around you – look at your
community, your family and where you’re at, it’s really
not that bad.”
In a year where it’s hard not to lose all faith in the
future of our species and in human civilization itself,
saying “the world’s not that bad of a place” is almost
a radical act of optimism. Frick’s new show at the
FOUND:RE hotel, Man + Man, is infused with this
hopeful spirit.
After putting on two previous solo exhibitions that
focused on how people interact with public art
(Man + Made) and on the relationship between
humanity and nature (Man + Nature), the prolific
painter’s final 2017 show takes a look at the
social bonds that hold us together. Her pictures
challenge Sartre’s acidic declaration that “Hell is
other people” by suggesting the exact opposite. After
all, few things make life bearable more than pleasant
company and fellowship.
Frick’s dreamy, soft-focus paintings of cityscapes,
hummingbirds and people owe a great stylistic debt
to the French Impressionists. But she uses a mixedmedia
process that adds additional layers of visual
detail and meaning in her work that makes them
wholly her own. She creates most of her paintings
by initially assembling them in collage form from
magazine scraps and then painting over the cut-andpasted
pieces to create lush, impressionistic pictures.
These mixed-media collage paintings can be
disorientating to look at. Words bubble up out of
nowhere on sidewalks and on top of clouds. Collage
pictures of dogs, children and strange beings appear
in the background – tiny, unpainted windows offering
a peek into the original world the artist put together
and painted over. It gives her paintings of local
landmarks like the Westward Ho a pixelated quality,
like looking at a Monet screensaver that’s glitching.
Her collaging process also yields odd synchronicities.
“One of the pieces in this series is a painting of
people sitting outside of Lux,” Frick says. “In the
collage, I saw the word Luxury in text. Take u-r-y
out of that and you’ve got Lux. Stuff like that is
not planned – people don’t quite understand how
I can’t see that while I’m doing it. The words and
images leave a story that isn’t controlled – that’s
the fun of it.”
Where most of us see chaos, Frick sees order
emerging miraculously, like a string of alphabet soup
letters spelling out a sentence. That’s the beauty of
the paintings in Man + Man: they remind us that
somewhere in all the noise of the world, there are
still people worth signaling to.
Man + Man
December 1 to 31
FOUND:RE
1100 N. Central Ave., Phoenix
aileenfrick.com
JAVA 17
MAGAZINE