Eric Fischl: It's Where I Look...It's How I See...Their World, My World, the World

The paintings in Eric Fischl's Krefeld Project depict a middle-aged couple in the throes of a long-term relationship, isolated but together, bored but bound. Made from photographs of hired models who inhabited a rented house for four days while the artist snapped more than 2,000 pictures, the paintings show the couple before and after sex, in the shower and brushing teeth, on the toilet and on the phone. According to essayist and poet Geoffrey Young, "Fischl shows flickers of desire, but more frequently he notices the ways in which a couple exists in the same room, without contact. Hopperesque in their silence, the pictures are so confidently and technically alive that even these models fronting as a couple are redeemed in their uncertainty, acknowledged in their isolation, encouraged in their effort to spark the flint to feel it all again, the passion that is only rarely given to them."