David Mark Wise

Frank Piatek became known in the seventies as a practitioner of “Allusive Abstraction.” His paintings show tubes intertwining, crossed and knotted. Early on he was compared to Frank Stella, but as he developed, his paintings became elegant biomorphic emblems, situated in a kind of no-man’s land between figuration and abstraction, often full of a ripe sexuality and made perhaps for the contemplation of a simple biological fact—that the body plan of all animals is a tube, and that at a fundamental level we all are tubes, made for processing the materials of the world. But in Piatek this brute materialism is imbued with an intense spirituality: the knotted and intertwined forms come from the Book of Kells, from Aztec, Minoan and pharaonic Egyptian iconography. They are part of what Piatek calls his “archaeology of knots.”

Born in 1944, Piatek attended Lane Tech—the high-school classrooms were often filled with screams from the roller coaster at Riverview across the street. At the School of the Art Institute he achieved a string of early successes—in 1967 he won the foreign travel fellowship; in that year Don Baum brought a curator from the Whitney to visit the studio Piatek built with his father, a visit that led to his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial before he had even finished his BFA. He took the fellowship money and embarked on an intense regime of travel and work, filling notebook after notebook with seminal drawings and sketches and ideas, leaving Paris just as the May 1968 demonstrations began to boil over. He was back in Chicago in 1969, and had one-man shows at the Hyde Park Art Center, as well as the Phyllis Kind gallery, the place to go for all things Hairy Who—Jim Nutt, Barbara Rossi, Karl Wirsum, Gladys Nilsson—at a time when everyone was talking about “the Chicagoization of New York.”

But Piatek was not really one of that crew. Over the following decades he cultivated an art of spiritual resonances and concatenations, making the basement of his studio into a place of esoteric symbolic investigations. A turning point for him, he says, came on December 9, 1972, when, after dreaming of a dead man in a boat, he created his first boat sculpture, an emblem of shamanic communication between macrocosm and microcosm, between this world and what he calls “the Great and Timeless World.” As early as 1977 he contributed one of these death boats to N.A.M.E.’s “Daley’s Tomb,” a show otherwise full of political sarcasm. For example, there were works like Tom Palazzolo’s “The Presumption” that showed the late mayor as Christ in Raphaelite ascension into the clouds. But Piatek’s shamanic boat was a gesture not at all in the mocking spirit of his Hairy fellow travelers.

This same gravity can be seen in the current installation at Finestra. “Almost Voyage Time/Traveler’s Report” is an altar-like installation of two boats placed together to form a dehiscing seedpod. Hanging from lengths of intertwined and knotted string are paper tags, gessoed and covered with drawn marks, word fragments and printed matter like stock quotes, etymologies and Egyptian sacred writing. It is a gathering together of materials on the verge of being transmitted; there is an aura of readiness and anticipation. It is a moving emblem of death and finitude.

Frank Piatek shows at Finestra, Fine Arts Building, 410 South Michigan, Suite 516, through July 30. (2008-07-15)

Also by David Mark Wise

Portrait of the Artist
Last Saturday in the MCA’s 12x12 exhibition room, a boy began to prance around, chanting the phrase “Hibiscus and gravy! Hibiscus and gravy!” The boy’s annoyed mother led him out of the room. Surely there is something rather wonderful about an artist who can provoke a scene like this. Mark Booth’s text paintings and drawings seem slight and ephemeral, and they are, in a sense, recordings of fleeting thoughts that most people do not stop to record or even verbalize, unless they are children
(2008-06-17)

Portrait of the Artist
Frieman’s point of view is the fruit of many years on both sides of the academia-industry divide. In 1994, upon graduating with honors from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Frieman was awarded the Cornelia Steckl Fashion Fellowship and promptly went to Italy, where she interned at a knitting factory outside of Ancona, associated with the Moschino design house. The experience left its mark
(2008-06-03)

Tip of the Week
Some might think the term “Chicago Imagism” describes a sensibility that is typically Chicago, but the artists in this show are so diverse, one wonders what could possibly unite them under one name
(2008-05-27)

Tip of the Week
Tony Fitzpatrick once said that Studs Terkel was his biggest influence as an artist. This is worth bearing in mind when you see his works, which are full of the collaged detritus of the everyday life of times past in Chicago: matchbook covers, tramcar tickets, comic books, postcards, notes and chords cut out of old sheet music. This technique is put to brilliant and moving effect in works like “Music of White Flowers,” three strange compositions whose story you know but find hard to put into words
(2008-05-20)

Tip of the Week
(2008-05-06)

Eye Exam
(2008-04-15)

Tip of the Week
(2008-04-08)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-25)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-18)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-05)

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