Fitzcarraldo

Dorian FitzGerald: Fitzcarraldo
Arsenal Contemporary Art New York
23 March - 13 May, 2023

Arsenal Contemporary Art New York is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Canadian painter Dorian FitzGerald. The text below is written by Clint Roenisch, the founder and director of the eponymous gallery located in Toronto, Canada who has been working with FitzGerald for over a decade.

FitzGerald has spent the last two decades meticulously crafting a compelling, often monumental body of works, several of which have taken years to finish. His various lines of inquiry revolve around a central tenet: that the excesses, the follies, the deceptions and indulgences, the grand edifices, the opulence, the waste and plunder, the vanities, the subterfuges and the chummy pacts of the wealthy and the powerful, are all fodder for scrutiny. His subjects have ranged from the outdoor stage at the secretive Bohemian Grove during a production of Faust, a fake crown of costume jewelry made by the British to impress the King of Adra and help them facilitate their slave trade, to the staggering array of sunglasses collected by Elton John, to a vast aquarium stocked with black market fish. In this regard, FitzGerald has been compared to a contemporary court painter, albeit one who fully understands the paradox of using ostensibly beautiful works of art to deliver barbed comment on the very subjects he has so painstakingly rendered. FitzGerald's large paintings are constructed with acrylic paint (and occasionally caulking) in a slow, precise method that the artist has refined in his studio over several years. The pre-process involves researching imagery, preparing it with custom software, making a large-scale acetate transfer onto canvas and then building up the paint slowly in a manner that resembles a kind of pointillism filtered through vector graphics. Both colour theory and the physical properties of paint, such as drying times and viscosity, are brought to bear in the setting of the final image. The infinite patience and granular attention to detail suggest a kinship with Tibetan sand painting. While the latter, once finished, is soon wiped away to drive home the impermanence of all things, FitzGerald’s works tend to hold a mirror up to that innately human wish to be exalted and remembered in the minds of others before the scythe comes down, as it inevitably does for queen, shepherd (and artist) alike.0 

Anchoring the exhibition is a pair of monumental paintings, both depicting a room in a Parisian apartment. Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris (2015) is the furnished version. Daigre and Rybar’s New York- and Paris-based firm Valerian Rybar & Daigre Design Corporation was renowned for providing the most lavish interior design and decorating for society doyennes from Miami Beach to Marakkesh in the 1970s and 1980s. It was closed following Rybar’s death in 1992. Their clients included Guy and Marie-Helene de Rothschild, Nicholas and Genevieve DuPont, Antenor and Beatriz Patino, Samuel and Mitzi Newhouse, Pierre and Sao Schlumberger, Sir James Goldsmith, Christina Onassis and Stavros Niarchos. They employed a host of artisans all over the world who did anything from paint Medieval tapestries on blank walls to create mother-of-pearl panels for a bathroom. They designed much of the furniture and rugs and were meticulous about the choice of fabrics, using opulent materials like satins trimmed with gold thread. The related painting, four years in the making, acts as a kind of coda. Salon, Rue de Bac, Paris (2022), depicts the same room after Rybar’s death, now an empty hall of mirrors en route to being dismantled. The searing band of red in the centre of the painting, glowing behind a door already off its hinges, is a peek into the molten bedroom that they had once kitted out like a Roman general’s tent. 

Aquarium (Taboo) (2018), at 128” long and 40” high, was two years in the making. The painting shows a vibrant aquatic scene, with dazzling exotic fish and a mesmerizing array of coral. But the fish are black market, the coral has been pilfered, the 240-gallon tank is overcrowded with 53 specimens and the entire enterprise is kept alive by a complex system that is wholly unnatural and requires constant vigilance to prevent collapse. Of course, wild fish bound for the aquarium market must be caught alive and thus there exists an unsavoury network of divers who prowl the world’s reefs to find the most exotic and rare, often using cyanide spray to stun them (or inadvertently kill them if too much is used). The cyanide, when it settles on coral, soon kills that too.

Malcolm Forbes’ Balloon, Château de Balleroy, Normandy, France, (2019) depicts a massive hot-air balloon that Forbes had commissioned in the shape of his 17th century chateau, aloft on the lawn of same. Forbes, whose name became synonymous with modern wealth and jockeying for position, was known to brag that he owned more Faberge eggs than the Kremlin (10 to 12) and was never shy of using his magazine’s motto “Capitalist Tool” on his 727 jet, his helicopter or his satin bowling jackets. He once gave the mayor of Moscow a Capitalist Tool tote bag. He was also fond of telling people "I owe it all to hard work, initiative… and the death of my father.”

Fountain in Bavaria, Schloss Linderhof, for Ludwig II (2019) is the fountain of Linderhof Castle, built by King Ludwig II. Born in 1845, Ludwig became Bavaria’s king at age 18 but was made politically irrelevant in 1871 when the various princes of the German states met in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles to proclaim William I of Prussia as German Emperor. Now having time on his hands Ludwig plunged his kingdom into massive debt with megalomaniac construction projects like the Linderhof castle. He often disliked seeing his staff, so the dining table was built such that it could be set with food by the servants in the kitchen below and then winched up through the floor into the dining room, where Ludwig, sometimes dressed up as the French king Louis XIV, with whom he was obsessed, would sit down to eat alone. Eventually because of his reckless spending the German government decided to declare Ludwig insane and replace him with his uncle. On 12 June 1886, Ludwig was taken by force to be confined to a royal cell in the Berg palace on the shores of Lake Starnberg. His death the next day was never fully explained. Both Ludwig and his doctor were found drowned in the lake.

Smaller works in the exhibition include Greater Kudu, Army and Navy Club ("The Rag"), Pall Mall, London, which depicts an unfortunate kudu, one of whose curved horns slowly grew back through its own brain until it was shot and stuffed and hung on the wall of an elite London gentlemen's club.

Another, The Jealous Wall (2023), presents a view to a Gothic folly, the largest in Ireland. A so-called “sham ruin,” it was purposely built at great expense by Robert Rochfort in 1760 to obstruct his view of his brother George’s new mansion, much grander than his own. After the ruin’s completion, overseen by the celebrated Italian architect Barrodotte, Robert often lied to visitors that it was the ruin of the original family home. Rochfort was also known for having his wife kept under house arrest for thirty years at Gaulstown, the country estate, after accusing her of adultery with his other brother, Arthur. She had to apply to Robert for permission to walk the grounds and this was only given if accompanied by a footman ringing a bell and shouting obscenities about her.

Vermejo Park Ranch (2016) shows, in a nod to Soutine and Bacon, the slaughterhouse at Ted Turner’s sprawling 923-square mile, 590,823-acre ranch in northeastern New Mexico and southern Colorado. In similar spirit is the small black and white Reggia di Caserta (2023), also known as the largest royal palace in the world at over 2 million cubic meters. The construction of the palace began in 1752 for Charles VII of Naples who worked closely with his architect, Luigi Vanvitelli. In the end Charles never slept a night at the Reggia, abdicating in 1759 to become King of Spain long before it was finished.

Dorian FitzGerald (b. 1975 in Toronto, Canada, lives and works in Toronto, Canada). FitzGerald completed his Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at Sheridan/University of Toronto Mississauga. A selection of recent exhibitions includes: Fabulous Fabergé, Jeweller to the Czars, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015); The Painting Project, Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal (2013); Quebec and Canadian Art, 1980-2010: New Acquisitions, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2011); Empire of Dreams: Phenomenology of the Built Environment, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); Carte Blanche: Volume 2, Painting, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2008).