‘‘Bark’’, Dick Frizzell (Milford Galleries)
The title of Dick Frizzell’s current exhibition, ‘‘Bark’’, at Milford Galleries appears in Red
Painting (2018) as one of the many road signs Frizzell has congregated together in this large and, yes, predominantly red painting.
Condensed together in this particular work, signs advertising property maintenance, organic produce, firewood and ukuleles are tightly jammed up against one another, jostling for space and occasionally overlapping.
Other paintings in the category of handpainted roadside signs focus on motel signs, on roadside stalls for fruit and vegetables, and even horse manure. Frizzell is deft in his handling of the vernacular.
The other category of textbased works featured in ‘‘Bark’’, and I hope he will forgive the segue, is the work of poet Sam Hunt. The lines and stanzas Frizzell extracts from Hunt’s poetry, while still legible as text, become visual actors in a new play. In Doubtless (17) — A Sam Hunt Poem
(2011), for example, two excerpts from a Hunt poem are arranged in a dynamic counterpoint along a diagonal axis. Against a skyblue background one excerpt nestles in a white cloudlike form in the top left, while on the other side of a thin black diagonal line the second excerpt bunkers in a black box. It is Frizzell’s reworking of these two excerpts in the formal language of opposition (white/black, curvilinear/rectilinear, top/bottom) that amplifies the tension between the two fragments.