Joe Fyfe, “But a Flag Has Flown Away”

Funky yet elegant, formal yet throwaway, abstract yet representational—these contradictions define Fyfe’s paintings and continue to do so in his latest offerings. With an eye, perhaps, towards the centennial of World War I’s final year, the artist bases his latest compositions on a volume of poems written by Guillaume Apollinaire while he served in the trenches with the French army. Fyfe scrawls Apollinaire’s texts across mixed-media substrates of paint and found fabrics—including advertising banners, kites and in one instance, a Confederate flag. Evoking “materiality, lightness and distance,” as he puts it, Fyfe’s latest works mix the decorative with the political.