Tony Fitzpatrick exhibit a real cause for celebration
It's not often that art openings in Chicago turn into sprawling celebrations of sheer joy. But last week's opening-night party for "The Wonder -- Portraits of a Remembered City," the beautiful new show of drawing-collages by Tony Fitzpatrick, was one of those special nights when art-world caution and decorum seemed to fall away. There was no stinkin' wine and cheese at this shindig. People scarfed down juicy Italian beef sandwiches and nearly injured each other with bone-crushing handshakes and bear hugs. Twin rivers of cold beer and good will flowed, tributaries to an ocean of feeling for one of Chicago's finest, most authentic and least pretentious artists on one of the greatest nights of his working life.
The occasion was the display of about 60 drawing-collages from "The Wonder," Fitzpatrick's series commemorating his father (a burial-vault salesman who died of cancer in 1998) and the city they explored together. We know the story by now: "The Wonder" celebrates the Chicago working man, arraying objects -- especially matchbook covers, vintage advertising and playing cards, along with funeral flowers, rosaries and other accoutrements of the city's Catholic heritage -- around central drawn figures and slender but muscular poetic meditations on life, death, love, sex and politics.
Viewers who've seen Fitzpatrick's work only in his books will be struck by the subtle three-dimensionality of the original drawing-collages, which bulge and buckle in their frames, their surfaces uneven like broken pavement -- each fantastical creature, each matchbook cover, each line of poetry its own piece of a magic jigsaw puzzle. You become intensely aware of the collages as things, not just images of things, their defiantly unslick and lovable roughness bringing home their handmade quality, the hallmark of so much great Chicago art.
You're struck, too, by their total indifference to art-world fashion. Fitzpatrick doesn't make art to please art schools or museum curators; he makes it to please himself. Fortunately for us, what pleases him is communicating with people, not playing cat-and-mouse games calculated to make you feel you could get it if only you were smart enough. (You don't have to be an art major to feel spoken to by a Fitzpatrick piece.) That doesn't mean the work is remotely facile; it's as densely textured as anything ever produced by a Chicago artist, and each piece soaks up all the attention you can spare. You do have to be a little romantic, to let your mind drift into a half-dreaming, free-associational mode. And at least with "The Wonder," it helps to be in love with Chicago, even if that love also has some hate mixed in.
You also have to give Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs credit for devoting one of its signature Cultural Center spaces to Fitzpatrick, who publicly criticized the department last year in a series of protests over its changes to the city's public art ordinance. Tempers flared, and department officials, if they had chosen to, could have taken out their anger on Fitzpatrick by denying him this precious moment -- the perfect setting for the culmination of a decade of work. To their everlasting credit, they were bigger than that. Good for them. Good for us.
