Danny Ferrell: Castle in the Sky by Miles McEnery Gallery

DANNY FERRELL

DANNY FERRELL CASTLE IN THE SKY

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

QUIET FREEDOMS By Lauren O’Neill-Butler Danny Ferrell’s realist portraits put me in mind of various monuments and shrines—ranging from religious icons to public sculptures. In particular, his paintings remind me of the quietly profound Oscar Wilde monument in Dublin’s Merrion Square. “Larger than life” in all senses of the phrase, Wilde, at 6 feet 3 inches, was a towering man, and in the sculptor Danny Osborne’s rendition of him he appears life-sized, around forty years old, and dressed in his famous smoking jacket, which is carved in solid jade. (It’s said that a person who wears jade can attain a longer life, and maybe even immortality, which is something Wilde undoubtedly achieved through his work.) The monument is located on the corner opposite Wilde’s home at 1 Merrion Square, just around the bend from his alma mater, Trinity College. As a young boy, Wilde would have played at that very spot. When it was unveiled in 1997, the Wilde memorial was, amazingly, the first to honor the Irish poet and playwright, who had died 97 years earlier. As the art historian Paula Murphy argued: “It has taken nearly one hundred years for an Irish body, public or private, to risk suggesting that we might consider Oscar Wilde worthy of such commemoration. But then it has taken the same length of time for Ireland to awaken, reluctantly, to the existence of sexuality and the reality of the way in which it dictates a lifestyle.” Ferrell’s canvases refuse to wait for this kind of “awakening.” In ways similar to the subtly political Wilde memorial, Ferrell’s works depict gay men living their lives at ease and doing ordinary things, but through a wonderful sense of immortality. These paintings emphasize that a queer person, just like every living being, is permitted to have an existence full of ordinary moments—free from indignity, oppression, and hostility. “Free from” suggests what political theorists describe as negative liberties, however. And I’d argue that Ferrell’s work is all about positive liberty—the possibility of acting, or the fact of acting, in such a way as to take control of one’s life. This, to me, makes his work slyly revolutionary. While enrolled at Oxford University’s Magdalen College, Wilde became well known for his role in the aesthetic and decadent movements. He decorated his rooms with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers, blue china, and various objets d’art. He once remarked to friends, whom he

entertained extravagantly, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” The line quickly became renowned and was acknowledged as a motto by art cognoscenti. (It was also used against them by critics who sensed in it a terrible vacuousness.) Looking at Ferrell’s exquisite oil paintings, which also seem to flout notions of time, scale, and space, I understand the apprehension Wilde felt in the company of beauty.

Color is the primary way that Ferrell visually communicates the sensitivity and strength of his subjects. Ferrell’s canvases, with their often warm, glowing backdrops, are saturated in color and bursting with life. Through lush shades of red, purple, and orange, he commemorates and elevates his sitters. In an interview, Ferrell noted: “Color is incredibly important to me. So much so that I see color asserting itself as a secondary or tertiary character in the painting—a component with as much life and vitality as the figures I am depicting. Color also allows my work to have a particular sense of mood and creates an indeterminate sense of time and place. I see the paintings emerging from the intersection of emotional content and formalism, so the ways in which color, light, and surface interact with personal identity are all crucial to my practice.” While Ferrell’s paintings depict relatively ordinary scenes of friends and loved ones, they are anything but ordinary. In fact, they are almost enchanted. His devotional works delight in building transcendent worlds through a sincere affection for the history of figurative painting, going all the way back to the Baroque. His rich, mystical canvases divulge many aesthetic forebears. During a studio visit, I learned that he adores, for instance, the “softness and the pageantry” in Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s paintings as well as the artwork of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, another French painter and printmaker of the late Rococo era. Ferrell also finds inspiration in works by Ed Paschke, an American painter best known for his neon-hued images of pinup posters, glowing televisions, and classical Greek sculptures. (Ferrell is especially fond of the artist’s “acidic” palette.) Other artists who come to mind include Lisa Yuskavage, Kaye Donachie, George Tooker, Paul Cadmus, David Hockney, and even René Magritte, the Belgian artist and quintessential Surrealist, who became well known for producing now-iconic droll images. Ferrell’s captivating muses resist queer stereotypes and the relentless representation of hard bodies in mainstream gay-male culture. There aren’t any juiced-up dudes or leather

The Divide, 2021, Oil on canvas, 50 x 42 inches, 127 x 106.7 cm

daddies in his works. Moreover, there aren’t any calamitous or “dodgy” gay men, as seen in homophobic films like Cruising and Windows (both 1980), which portrayed gay masculinity in an unrelentingly negative light. In Ferrell’s images, one senses abundant and sensuous male vulnerability, which remains open to a female eroticism as well. Furthermore, Ferrell doesn’t ignore the fact that a sense of queer “freedom” can rely on silent but steadfast forms of racial exclusion, particularly in predominantly white gay male communities, such as Fire Island’s The Pines, to name just one location. There, the “anonymity” of cruising, for instance, can be read as yet another kind of ethnic erasure for many gay men of color. To his credit, Ferrell eschews specific and iconic locations. In his unspecified, everyday worlds, handsome people of color resist invisibility. The Divide (2021) depicts a Black man draped in an extraordinarily vibrant, multicolored button-down shirt—against a crepuscular sky. His face, partially obscured by a tie-dye mask (in a nod to Covid times), conveys a desire for friendship more than an erotic air of objectification. The picture is not sultry but sweet— the artist’s rendering of a man embraced by warm yellow and pink circles feels loving, not lurid. Ferrell’s canvases always begin with a photograph of the subject; there is a lens behind all his work. After making the picture he wants, he works on an iPad to produce a digital drawing. “Once I feel good about that,” he told me, “I pretty much directly translate that iPad drawing

onto canvas. Very rarely is there any deviation.” This merging of various mediums, forms, and media recalls a line in Susan Sontag’s classic tome On Photography (1977) regarding the sometimes-vexed historical relationship between painting and photography: “The camera’s way of fixing the appearance of the external world suggested new patterns of pictorial composition and new subjects to painters: creating a preference for the fragment, raising interest in glimpses of humble life, and in studies of fleeting motion and the effects of light” (p. 146). She continues, “Painting did not so much turn to abstraction as adopt the camera’s eye, becoming (to borrow Mario Praz’s words) telescopic, microscopic, and photoscopic in structure. But painters have never stopped attempting to imitate the realistic effects of photography.”

The sleek bicycle rider in I Kiss Boys (2021), impossibly monumental against a crescent moon, carries a bouquet of flowers on his back tire rack and wears a T-shirt broadcasting the title of the work. Like the man in The Divide, the figure here stares straight at the viewer, this time with a slight Mona Lisa smile and wise-looking eyes. A shock of red hair sits atop his head, playing a visual game with his green garments and the spray of blooms behind him. A masterful colorist, Ferrell here presents an image that is terrifically alluring and feels like a fragment from history. It recalls both the cover of a mid-century queer pulp magazine and the kind of everyday picture people post on social media all the time. By playing with this type of temporal drag, a queer pulling of the past onto the present, Ferrell transforms the outlawed sexuality of the 1950s into more vernacular, commonplace imagery—and this is important because a picture like this is still not considered mainstream. Writing about how it felt to be depicted in one of Ferrell’s canvases (Fred and Adam, 2018), the artist Adam Milner wrote: “Maybe generosity is letting someone feel pretty whether they are or aren’t; maybe it’s the reassurance that love and beauty are the norm and not the exception; maybe it’s helping us pretend, for a moment, that we don’t have to be here. The generosity embedded at the heart of Danny’s work is a kind of love. There’s affection and admiration in his portraits, even the solo ones, as he gently brings to life the images of people he’s close with, rendering them with a careful and considerate touch.” To me, this approach to love is one of the greatest gifts an artist can offer, particularly in our unrelenting present. As Wilde once wrote, “Who, being loved, is poor?” Lauren O’Neill-Butler is a New York-based writer whose book Let’s Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture (New York: Karma, 2021) brings together nearly ninety interviews. A cofounder of the nonprofit publishing endeavor November and a former senior editor of Artforum, she has also contributed to Art Journal, Bookforum, and The New York Times.

Thirty in Palm Springs, 2020 Oil on canvas 84 x 72 inches 213.4 x 182.9 cm

I Kiss Boys, 2021 Oil on canvas 84 x 60 inches 213.4 x 152.4 cm

Arcadia, 2022

Color pencil on paper 48 x 383/8 inches 121.9 x 97.5 cm

Touch-Up, 2022 Oil on canvas 84 x 60 inches 213.4 x 152.4 cm

The Night Shift, 2022 Oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches 61 x 50.8 cm

The Farmer’s Son, 2022 Oil on canvas 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

Straw Halo, 2022 Oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches 61 x 50.8 cm

Living Proof, 2022

Color pencil on paper 48 x 38 inches 121.9 x 96.5 cm

Retrograde, 2022

Color pencil on paper 48 x 38 inches 121.9 x 96.5 cm

The Substitute, 2022 Oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches 61 x 50.8 cm

IN CONVERSATION Shona McAndrew interviews Danny Ferrell New York City and Pittsburgh, Spring 2022

DANNY FERRELL: I am now thirty, and that means you are thirty-one because we share the same birthday. It’s important for the reader that they know that we were born on the same day because it means that we are cosmically aligned and connected.

SHONA McANDREW: That is a big deal. We are very similar people in so many ways, and wildly different in many others. So, I think our birthday is a connector. DF: Absolutely, and that is what initially bonded us when we were at Rhode Island School of Design together. We also have similar points-ofview when it comes to the visual arts. I remember us having deep conversations about aesthetics and formalism, technique and craft. SM: We observe in the same way because of who we were and are, how we felt about ourselves and how society made us feel about ourselves. DF: Absolutely, I think this is a good way of starting the conversation! You were born in Paris and I was born in Flint, Michigan, but spent my formative years in central Pennsylvania. I have this small town, Americana perspective and I think you approach your work with a more European mindset. I mean you had the Louvre! SM: I certainly had a very privileged and comfortable upbringing. What I did have in common with you is that I also felt very ostracized. I was fat

from day one–as my father loves to say, I was the fattest kid in the hospital on the day of my birth. I also only spoke English at home so I felt very different from my French culture. Whether that was real or not real, I still felt very different. That is also true for you. You came from this small town that was and still is very conservative and religious. You were a gay, young man which goes against a lot of religious and conservative values. DF: You hear people talk about this all the time, that it was easier for my generation to come out of the closet, and absolutely it was. When I think about it retrospectively, I still was in the closet when sodomy laws were on the books. Lawrence vs. Texas was still being arbitrated in 2003, long before I came out of the closet. Of course, at thirteen I didn’t know the various legal structures that were in place to penalize gay people, which is pretty wild for me to think about. Beyond that there was not a lot of visual representations of healthy, successful gay men in the media. All I saw was this portrayal of gay men as highly dysfunctional, drug addicted, incapable of love, or dying from AIDS. SM: I’m sure there still may be kids in that neighborhood that are feeling the same way you felt. DF: I just remember that being such a thing for me. Back in the day, I was afraid of the flamboyant gay man on some level because that is how I was cultured. I was terrified of eventually becoming that man, but I am! Now I regard that colorful

ostentatiousness as something very special, and not to be feared. SM: I think that you paint about things you’ve experienced–I mean, at least it’s true for me. I can always track my personal and psychological progress with where my paintings are. DF: Definitely. That makes me think of my first experience with a painting, which was not in a museum or a gallery, but above my favorite grandmother’s rocking chair. It is this incredible painting of my great aunt Virginia, dated by the artist in 1913. She’s so glamorous, so moody and psychological, saturated in this other-worldly red light. SM: Quite an amazing painting.

DF: Now that I look back, I realize how much that painting has had such an aesthetic influence on me. It still holds up to some of my favorite early paintings like Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin and Rembrandt’s The Ascension. My favorite paintings to this day are paintings of the Ascension of Jesus or the Assumption of Mary. Everything is so idealized and theatrical, with the draping garments, pillowy clouds and beams of light. SM: You do this in your work. Your subjects feel elevated or saintly in some way. DF: I’m trying to make the figures in my paintings feel like idols, because that’s how I see them. The title for the exhibition is Castle in the Sky. Not only is it the title for one of my favorite Miyazaki films, but it is also an expression for an unfulfilled wish or desire. The whole theme of the show is this reflection of my teenage dreams and fantasies that I never got to experience. SM: I love it. It goes so well with the work you’ve already made for the show. DF: Thank you! I’m very excited. SM: I’m on a new self-love kick, it’s been a month now. I’m not in any place to talk about people who physically exert themselves and do great things, but I can imagine the hardest mountains to climb are the ones that feel the best when you’re at the top. You made it, and just that feeling of having survived something incredibly difficult and challenging. I say all of this because the painting you’re making, which is a man bent over, fixing a tractor– DF: The Farmer’s Son. SM: Yes, this painting is the living embodiment of a painter’s mountain.

Top Left: Unknown Artist, Lady in Red, Virginia, 1913 Top Right: John Singleton Copley, The Ascention, 1775, Oil on canvas, 32 x 28 3/4 inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Bottom: Juan Martin Cabezalero, The Assumption of the Virgin, 1665, Oil on canvas, 93 3/10 x 66 1/2 inches, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

John Stezaker, Love XX, 2016 Collage, 10 1/8 x 8 1/8 inches (25.9 x 20.8 cm) © John Stezaker. Courtesy of The Approach, London Photo: Damian Griffiths

DF: Thank you, it’s been a slow climb up the mountain! I also have been recently thinking about what I want my art to communicate. My favorite paintings are the ones that I’m unable to ground in language, like the painting is speaking to me on a different frequency. I hope when people have that experience when they come and see the work, or at the very least have a quiet, spiritual moment. SM: I think they will, especially because you’re so generous with how you talk about your work, too. DF: Well, the best piece of advice I received as an artist was to “throw out all this terminology, just speak about the work in a way that is authentic to you.” That was so freeing. So, when I say that the work is about color, beauty, technique, and boys and magic, that’s good enough for me.

John Stezaker, Pair XXV, 2014 Collage, 29 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches (23.5 x 18.4 cm) © John Stezaker. Courtesy of Richard Gray Gallery Photo: Michael Tropea

SM: What we also have in common is that we’re painting real people and their bodies. DF: I’m sure you have this experience as well, the mental fortitude it takes to transcribe something from three dimensions into two dimensions. There’s the physical component of it as well–when you’re painting a portrait, you’re really ruminating over this person’s face and having this very sustained exchange. There is this incredibly sensual experience that comes with painting somebody’s likeness. For me, sometimes that even comes down to physically touching the image of their face, to blend a cheek or soften a line. SM: Brilliant. We should also talk about how we make images, the collages, which also adds to

magical realism because I think about my paintings as being reality, but reality turned up 10%. Everything’s a little bit more colorful and bright. There’s a little more contrast, the landscapes are green and lush, but there is a doubleness there. I think a lot of the ambiguity in my work comes from the skyscapes. Is it smoke? Is it volcanic ash? Are they clouds?

George Tooker, In the Summerhouse, 1958 Egg tempera on fiberboard, 24 x 24 in. (61.0 x 61.8 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation Washington, D.C.

George Tooker, Singer, 1961-1962 Egg tempera on masonite, 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Hollis K. Thayer Left; Right © George Tooker Estate, Brooklyn, NY

the more theatrical setup of our work. It’s a real space, but not really, because we fabricated it. I think that’s an interesting part of our practices.

me are scrim curtains for musical theater backgrounds. I was in every high school play and would marvel at these backdrops. I just love the soft, fuzziness of a scrim curtain, and then these very real actors perform right in front of it, almost casting a shadow on that flat background from the stage lights. I love that little uncanniness that comes with it.

DF: We do this a lot, and I think we both have this collage aesthetic, which I try and suppress as much as I can, but I still want that little bit of weird disorientation, that otherworldly feeling you get through collage. John Stezaker does this so well. SM: I think that’s very visible. You even said it earlier when you were talking about The Farmer’s Son. You want it to feel a bit theatrical. I find when I follow my collages, it feels a bit theatrical because there are these planes that I have to create. How do I puzzle together the foreground, background and figure? DF: Absolutely. Something that really inspires

SM: That could be a great way to relate it to magical realism, which I know is important to you. DF: I think a lot about the Cadmus circle, how that collides with the Chicago Imagists and The Hudson River School of Painting. Beyond that, Magritte has been somebody that’s been incredibly resonant in my studio lately, so all of that coalesces together to help guide me in my process. I have this interest in the term

Magic realism was coined by a German critic named Franz Roh to describe real paintings with a dreamlike or fantasy twist. It is important to say that it is not a variation of the fantasy genre. You and I are not making concept art. There has to be this magical fantasy or dreamlike element, but described in an almost nonchalant way. Then, in addition to that, it makes some kind of social commentary in the process. SM: You and I like to complain, make fun of things and laugh, but we also have had a lot of times in our life when we didn’t laugh. Felt self-conscious and unwanted. We still fight the bad days. I think we are both showing an alternative world, a sanctuary or haven. So although it is rooted in something real, it’s also our fantasy. At the end of the day, we want to honor who we paint, give them the spotlight, and hopefully the paintings we make will bring people some happiness or peace. DF: Yeah, those are all our little wishes. A Castle In The Sky.

DANNY FERRELL Born in Flint, MI in 1991 Lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA

EDUCATION 2016 MFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 2014 BFA, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2022 “Castle in the Sky,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2021 “Storms and Saints,” Galerie Pact, Paris, France 2019 “Honey,” Marinaro, New York, NY 2018 “Magic Hour,” Galerie Pact, Paris, France 2014 “Cakes,” Patterson Gallery, State College, PA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2022 “COMPETERE: An Exhibition of Artist Couples,” Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus, GA 2021 “Just As I Am,” 1969 Gallery, New York, NY 2020 “Sound and Color” (curated by Brian Alfred), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Vortex” (curated by Allison Zuckerman), Kravets Wehby,

New York, NY “Surely Some Revelation is At Hand,” Marinaro, New York, NY

“Sit Still” (curated by Patty Horing and Deborah Brown), Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY 2019 “After and Because of,” Marsh Gallery, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN 2018 “Bathers,” Bass and Rainer, San Francisco, CA “Bang On,” Divine Hammer, Able Baker Contemporary, Portland, ME “Behind the Curtain” (with Hiba Schahbaz and Sophia Narrett), Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL “Potpourri,” Neumann Wolfson Fine Art, New York, NY “Artists Who Teach,” Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, PA 2017 “Life’s Rich Pageant,” Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY “He’s American” (with Devan Shimoyama), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA “Canon Fodder,” Zoller Gallery, University Park, PA 2016 “Vernacular Spectacular!,” Gelman Gallery, Providence, RI “RISD 2016 MFA Painting Thesis Exhibition,” Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY “The Boston Biennial,” Atlantic Works Gallery, Boston, MA “RISD Graduate Thesis,” Rhode Island Convention Center, Providence, RI 2015 “Halfmasters,” Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY “Boston Young Contemporaries,” 808 Commonwealth Gallery, Boston, MA 2014 “Pale Firework,” Gelman Gallery, Providence, RI “U.F.O. Hunters, RISD Painting Biennial,” Sol Koffler Gallery, Providence, RI “The Sex Offense,” Propeller Gallery, Toronto, Canada

2013 “Unmarked,” The Active Space, New York, NY “SOVA Alumni Work,” HUB-Robeson Gallery, State College, PA “School of Visual Arts BFA Exhibition,” Zoller Gallery, State College, PA “School of Visual Arts Annual Juried Exhibition” Zoller Gallery, State College, PA The Jones Center for Contemporary Art, Austin, TX “Paint, American Style,” Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Radar Love” (with Gajin Fujita, Andrea Bowers and Linda Stark), Gallery Marabini, Bologna, Italy

AWARDS 2016 Graduate Fellowship, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 2014 Creative Acheivement Award, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA 2013 Yale Norfolk School of Art Summer Program Nominee, Yale School of Arts, New Haven, CT 2012 Merit Award Winner, Annual Juried Show, State College, PA Creative Artist’s Agency, Los Angeles, CA

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

DANNY FERRELL CASTLE IN THE SKY 17 March – 23 April 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2021 Lauren O’Neill-Butler Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Digital Initiatives Associate Sean Kennedy, New York, NY Photography by Tom Little, Pittsburgh, PA Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-69-4 Cover: Touch-Up, (detail), 2022