| Born Fernando de Jesus Oliveira in Bahia, Brazil in 1946,
the artist who goes by the simple name of Ferjo is one of the most dynamic
and intriguing artists on the contemporary American scene. His
surreal, even metaphysical way with a canvas has been lauded earlier, with Ferjo winning the prestigious Crescent Scholarship; at the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts, and the New York Council for the Arts Award for
Excellence in portraiture.
However, portraits are not what we see in Ferjo's latest works.
Rene Magritte, the Belgian surrealist, would be proud of Ferjo's new art -
an exciting, entrancing, mentally and sensually stimulating blend of the
every day with the extraordinary, the plain with the fantastic. Most
of Ferjo's paintings taken within an abandoned interior, a "room with
a view" out of a large window, made up of puffy, transcendent clouds
and nature at the extremes of either sunrise or sunset. In one,
giant pencils float down a blue-carpeted stairway, and illegible paintings
hang mysteriously on the walls, while a Siamese cat downstairs watches
agog as blowfish, a broken blobular "eggshell" and transparent
bubbles float before him.
Another painting takes place on an old porch looking out to the sea,
with dogs, swans, and strange white and purple saplings all basking in the
warm glow of mid-afternoon light. Another is simply a window frame -
again overlooking the water, but this time at sunset, all greens and
yellow with a single boat moored in the deep and a single rift of clouds
on its stern, seemingly having escaped from the bank of grey-white clouds
above.
Ferjo's
work partakes of both the old masters and the 20th century surrealists, of
Vermeer and de Chirico, of the hieroglyphs of the waking eye and the
technicolor bounty of the eye asleep, in dreams. He is a master painter
with a style which reassures the heart with its beauty, while astounding
the perceptions with constant visual surprise
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