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Gregory Prestegord at F.A.N. Gallery
All that urban jazz
“I feel like he plays like I paint.”
–Gregory Prestegord on a painting of a jazz musician.
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
Gregory Prestegord’s paintings are meant to be hung on walls and seen. You look at them. You “get” it. Case closed. He doesn’t do the sort of work that you have to stare at and stare at, trying to decipher its message. He paints the streets of the city, and sometimes the folks who live on and off those streets. It’s all very open and above board.
A painting like Thought, a dreamy, Hollywood-looking nocturne, is an emblem. It stands for every city street, bathed in neon or washed by rain that you’ve ever seen. This is by far my favorite work in the exhibit.
The other works are a good deal less mythic and more reportorial in nature. For the most part, the “address portraits” (i.e., Eighth and South, Tenth and Sansom) are documentary and remind me a bit of Utrillo’s paintings of Parisian neighborhoods. But the occasional less-ambitious work, like Spring Garden or Chillin’ in Chinatown, nudges toward abstraction in the manner of David Brewster.
North Philly exists almost as a color symphony, with the walls of buildings rendered as bold slabs of color. Although most of Prestegord’s work is on the dark-hued side, his Heaven in the Ghetto captures the power of a flash of sunlight to transform the drabbest of surroundings.
Sharing space with Prestegord’s work is a smallish gathering of works by other artists who’ve exhibited at F.A.N.— an excellent introduction to the gallery as a whole. Treacy Ziegler has contributed a large, but typically moody, landscape, Midnight Sun. There’s also a nice selection of Al Gury’s landscapes, which always put me in mind of settings for Chekhov plays.
You’ll also find several finely wrought bronze sculptures by Joshua Koffman. The Armored Heart is at once recognizably contemporary, yet redolent of some of the best work done during the Symbolist and Art Deco periods.
“I feel like he plays like I paint.”
–Gregory Prestegord on a painting of a jazz musician.
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
Gregory Prestegord’s paintings are meant to be hung on walls and seen. You look at them. You “get” it. Case closed. He doesn’t do the sort of work that you have to stare at and stare at, trying to decipher its message. He paints the streets of the city, and sometimes the folks who live on and off those streets. It’s all very open and above board.
A painting like Thought, a dreamy, Hollywood-looking nocturne, is an emblem. It stands for every city street, bathed in neon or washed by rain that you’ve ever seen. This is by far my favorite work in the exhibit.
The other works are a good deal less mythic and more reportorial in nature. For the most part, the “address portraits” (i.e., Eighth and South, Tenth and Sansom) are documentary and remind me a bit of Utrillo’s paintings of Parisian neighborhoods. But the occasional less-ambitious work, like Spring Garden or Chillin’ in Chinatown, nudges toward abstraction in the manner of David Brewster.
North Philly exists almost as a color symphony, with the walls of buildings rendered as bold slabs of color. Although most of Prestegord’s work is on the dark-hued side, his Heaven in the Ghetto captures the power of a flash of sunlight to transform the drabbest of surroundings.
Sharing space with Prestegord’s work is a smallish gathering of works by other artists who’ve exhibited at F.A.N.— an excellent introduction to the gallery as a whole. Treacy Ziegler has contributed a large, but typically moody, landscape, Midnight Sun. There’s also a nice selection of Al Gury’s landscapes, which always put me in mind of settings for Chekhov plays.
You’ll also find several finely wrought bronze sculptures by Joshua Koffman. The Armored Heart is at once recognizably contemporary, yet redolent of some of the best work done during the Symbolist and Art Deco periods.
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