Barry Frydlender: The Fourth Dimension

by Donald Goddard

The pictures fill up with people and things, parts of buildings and landscapes, city streets and various values of light, like gestured or measured collations of color in paintings. They represent the immanence of particular places over time in Israel and Egypt, where historical immanence is perhaps more keenly felt than anywhere else. There is, however, nothing ancient in any of these scenes, except for the land itself, and a Palestinian cemetery in one of them. Most of the people are young and ebullient, relaxing on the beach, out on Friday night, fooling around in line to visit the war museum, playing in a circle with a soccer ball. A few are older, in an East Jerusalem café, at a peace demonstration.

The Flood, 2003.
50" x 94 1/2"

With one exception (Dream Sinai, a circle within a square that is also the only photo without people), the scenes are horizontal, some extremely so. In Salame, the long, narrow format literally suggests a story, a line of text reading from right to left, as though in Hebrew or Arabic. A car at the center, from which the driver looks toward us, has moved halfway, paralleling our own vision, from the cross-street on the right to the one on the left. Everything takes place in front of us, parenthesized by the two end streets lunging into depth. This is what is happening, contained within the interlocking structures of cars, houses, streets, with the implication that paths to other places, at the ends of this scene, will lead to another set of circumstances, another reality nonetheless related to this one.

That is the tension in all Frydlender's pictures. They are knitted together like fabrics--human movements, gestures, and intentions woven into each other and into extraordinarily complex structures of verticals and diagonals within the generally horizontal overall shapes. The chains of existence seem almost unbreakable. But, of course, they are composed of elements that are in a constant state of flux and happen to come together in certain ways. And the artist extends that process by forming his own patterns out of digital segments. The scene of young bathers on a Sinai beach in Egypt (Sinai, Smoking) has all these qualities, bridging time and space in the figures of people walking and reclining. It must be near the places where 35 people were killed in explosions in early October.

These are powerful yet very fragile realities, like the land in which they are made, as part of the world in which we live. Each work is like an explosion in which the fragments always re-coalesce, even those like Café Bialik and Café Bialik After, where a real explosion did occur. Still, in Jaffa/Bat Yam there is the side where Jewish settlers live, and the side of the Palestinian cemetery against the Mediterranean Sea, and the diagonal divide between them, along which a young girl seems to dance with her shadow toward a rectangular blank in the scene, left there by Frydlender because the building from which he would have shot a new fragment was no longer there when he revisited the site.

These are powerful yet very fragile realities, like the land in which they are made, as part of the world in which we live. Each work is like an explosion in which the fragments always re-coalesce, even those like Café Bialik and Café Bialik After, where a real explosion did occur. Still, in Jaffa/Bat Yam there is the side where Jewish settlers live, and the side of the Palestinian cemetery against the Mediterranean Sea, and the diagonal divide between them, along which a young girl seems to dance with her shadow toward a rectangular blank in the scene, left there by Frydlender because the building from which he would have shot a new fragment was no longer there when he revisited the site.

Donald Goddard © 2004