Frank Piatek
Frank Piatek (born 1944) is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process.
[15][16] Curator Lynne Warren describes Piatek as "the quintessential Chicago artist—a highly individualistic, introspective outsider" who has developed a "unique and deeply felt world view from an artistically isolated vantage point.
[6][29][30] They categorize his art into two bodies: more widely known images of intertwined, tubular forms; and primal works of sculpture, collage and installation that reveal his inner thoughts and creative process.
[29][33][32][34] Gedo and Yood have written that Piatek's work hovers between abstraction and figuration, providing a screen to stage open-ended, "sensuous and seductive dramas"[29] alluding to biology, sexuality, machine elements, and spirituality.
[41][42][43][36] They further characterize this work as featuring forceful drawing and rhythmical design that suggests coiled energy, subtle wet-on-wet modeling, cross-hatched brushwork and active surfaces, luminous color, and glowing ethereal light.
[44][35][1] Piatek developed his second body of introverted, shamanistic work in the early 1970s, during a time of personal and artistic crisis; writers identify key its themes as death and rebirth, macrocosm and microcosm, myth and the collective unconscious.
[49][31][48] Franz Schulze called the carvings persuasive, "fetishistic objects … sinister, private things, like effigies, full of atavistic implications;"[49] Derek Guthrie, however, found the primitive approach less convincing and over-intellectualized.
[51][52][10] They coined the label "Allusive Abstraction" for their approach, eventually promoting their ideas through Chicago Art Write, an artist-written publication co-edited by Piatek, Conger and Loving.
[1] Critics such as Alan Artner and Christopher Lyon identified a greater sense of eroticism in the work, alternately comparing it to the fleshy ruddiness of Rubens, the odalisques of Ingres, and musculature of Michelangelo.
[5][32][64] Critics such as Alan Artner and Andy Argy described these combinations of mixed-media, layered marks and processes as among his most elaborate works—dark, distilled stream-of-conscious pictorial diaries engaging genealogies of cultural history that reveal the sensibilities and interplay of abstraction and figuration underlying his paintings.
[18][65][66] Almost Voyage Time/Traveler’s Report (2008) was an altar-like installation of two boat/pod forms from which paper tags marked with drawing, symbols and text fragments hung, suggesting a gathering of material for transformation.
[21] The installations Kerux Aion (2007–8) and Theater of the Concealed Index (2014) continued Piatek's emphasis on text and the act of mark-making, combining drawings of words with myriad tags or pieces of cut paper that were marked and painted, often with iconic symbols or patterns, and hung in rows by twine.
