Wandering Planar

Feb 2013

Curated by AJ Rombach

︎ FJORD (2419 Frankford Ave)
"Space and space again is the infinite deity which surrounds us and which we are ourselves contained. Height, weight and depth which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus protect myself from the infinity of space." MAX BECKMANN

FJORD is pleased to announce our eighth group show, Wandering Planar, curated by A.J. Rombach. 

The works in this show have been selected to investigate the use of landscape as subject in contemporary painting.


Although Max Beckmann is often associated with portraiture, his lakeside scenes and urban landscape remove the direct assumption of allegory. Fittingly, as he was entirely concerned with the human condition, he sometimes included himself in the foreground establishing himself as witness. The painters exhibited in Wandering Planar establish themselves as witness to a spectrum of things from globalization to social ritual.

The two artists most directly concerned with the effects of globalization compose their visions in wildly different ways. Matthew
William Robinson writes that colors derived from the natural world feel more honest; meanwhile, Lisa Sanditz, far from any tonalist school, employs vivid color and pattern. Both artists are united in their inclusion of commodity and wreckage, nature and calamity. Although Jeremy Miranda's work feels less cautionary, it too seems to be commenting on "non-functioning systems" where collaged environments construct impermanent architecture on unstable ground, placing the natural alongside the manmade.

Painters Vera Iliatova and Abrahm Guthrie-Potter bring our attention back to the humans amidst the landscape. Iliatova's adolescent girls participate in various, established rituals that society expects. In Graduation, the looming metropolis blends into a browned smoggy sky suggesting that the only actual innocence and spirit left is contained in the children pictured in the wooded foreground, their role still undefined, just exploring the world, born into the invention of social construct and contract. Guthrie-Potter's scenes are dreams rooted in reality. Loosely rendered objects just-identifiable-enough sit in impressions of streets or rooms or seascapes. His characters and scenes are distinctly narrative, almost confessional, bringing the viewer to a variety of locations with the introduction of reoccurring players, like the household cat, Boo.

Mary Wittershein's paintings, loose and expressive, might just be the microscopic lens on it all, the up close view of the madness, from global to personal, reassuring us that it's all just an atomic hum. The work together reminds us of the spectrum of experience in which we all participate: the big picture informing each of our personal worlds, and vice versa. We are reminded that there is significance in describing a scene and acting witness. The pronounced and the implied characters of Wandering Planar exist in the reality that Sanditz and Robinson describe, a larger unfolding narrative regarding what will become of us all… Which brings us back to Mr. Beckmann, it seems as though we are protecting ourselves from the infinity of space when we paint.

-A.J. Rombach, Co-Founder FJORD Gallery






1720 N 5th Street G2
Philadelphia, PA 19122