“Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet,” wrote painter Paul Klee. And photography is the place where imagination meets reality. Franco Fontana, the 85-year-old master of color photography, makes work at those two junctures. His “True Color” exhibition is at Robert Klein Gallery.
Fontana finds and frames shapes in the landscape so spare and orderly his photographs lean into abstraction. Color sets them ablaze.
A pale green architectural urn anchors “Los Angeles.” It sits atop a fluted wall. Everything behind it appears flat: Sloping white ornamentation over red brick, a yellow rectangle of wall, an angled chunk of deep sky. The space feels claustrophobic until you notice a black splinter of a palm tree perching beside the urn. But it’s no miniature — its scale tells us how far off it is. Distance explodes.
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“Venice, Los Angeles,” another sequence of layered shapes, has the pure geometry of a Kazimir Malevich painting. It’s buildings, all planes and angles, accented with green and red. Even the shadows the photographer captures here don’t seem to model volume; rather, they’re small black flats. The Italian photographer frames what he sees as rhythms, and the colors play over us like melodies.
In more recent photos such as “Torino,” he follows Aaron Siskind’s lead and finds lyricism looking down at tar and asphalt. Fontana, of course, adds color — bands of painted red and white play backdrop to a lilting seam of black tar.
Sure, you might say, it’s easy to find geometric abstraction in a city — but the countryside? Fontana’s rural scenes look like distillations. In “Puglia,” yellow incandesces beneath a black horizon line swelling with a low hill. Two white clouds are stacked perfectly above that rise in the sapphire sky. In “Basilicata,” tilled and cultivated ribbons of earth unfurl like arranged ribbons.
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How form, space, and color affect the eye is the essence of abstraction. Fontana’s sensitivity to it imbues his photographs with the import of symbol and iconography. He turns the real world into a metaphysical one drenched in blues, yellows, and greens.
FRANCO FONTANA: TRUE COLOR
At Robert Klein Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through Aug. 16. 617-267-7997, www.roberkleingallery.com
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @cmcq.