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The Church Series: A Project by Fred Dalkey

Presented by Center for Contemporary Art at Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento

September 23-October 23, 2010

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The church takes up the corner of 23rd and K in downtown Sacramento. Painted white and stripped of any religious insignia, the large, solid stucco building is still clearly identifiable as to its previous use. The inside is much the same. The great hall, with its eighteen-foot ceiling, is thirty by forty feet, with a raised stage and proscenium at the north end. The tall, narrow, frosted windows reach almost to the ceiling, bathing the hall, and the air inside the hall, with pearlescent light. This room, like the outside of the building, has been cleansed of ornament. All of the furniture has been removed, and the entire floor is covered with neutral grey carpet. White paint covers the walls and ceiling, further reflecting the constant interior light.

Fred Dalkey has been sitting in the chair facing the window and table and the two small vases and has been making paintings for the greater part of the year. He often arrives at the church in the late morning when the light entering the east-facing window is its most intense, and paints as the sun moves up and over the roof. The frosted window obscures any view from outside, and softens the transition of the light as it changes through the morning and into the afternoon. But to say that he has been painting the vases, or even the light flooding over the vases would not be quite accurate.

They are more than paintings of two vases; they are an attempt to capture the flowing quality of sight itself. Each one of these scenes is the record of a specific optical occurrence. It is as if the church on K Street was designed as an optical laboratory with its high white walls and infused bright light to afford an ideal environment for this intensified observation. The energized brushwork utilized to capture the light as it surrounded the model in the figure paintings is now used to identify the fleeting essence of color at a precise moment. Using the nominal subject of the vases, painted over the course of a year, Dalkey has been able to concentrate his attention on the perceived surface of vision.

Above excerpts from the essay, The Church Series--A Project by Fred Dalkey by C. Daubert. 2010.