August 7th - September 1st 2022

Opening reception: August 7th 6-8 pm

Central Fine is pleased to present, Victory, the first exhibition in Miami Beach, Florida, of paintings by New York based artist, Frederic Tuten. The exhibition will feature six oil paintings on canvas and on panel, all made in 2022.

Tuten’s paintings are informed by color, lines, and its transformations; establishing dialectical engagements with each other. A text emerges from that conversation, pulled from the archive of days and the subconscious. The paintings are populated by hills, clouds, hats, faces, bottles, flowers, fences, bowls, non-representational shapes…everything. They could be thought of as receptacles of a multitude of associations, that somehow recall Frederic’s work as a novelist and screenplay writer (Tuten co-wrote the film Possession, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, with the late Andrzej Żuławski).

A sense of being in a threshold where veils are pierced and free association takes over, charges Tuten’s work, both as a painter and writer, with a sense of urgency and unpredictability. A fierce calmness points to the angles where the unknown and joy merge; and what hinges in the void where beauty and the void coexist.

In Victory we access life’s prism, its beauty and loss. We see That Thing that hooks us, like a poem with endless variations, fractured by logic and re-arranged by the vividness of what lies within the units at play, which are activated by the gaps that intersect the relation of the unconscious, between reality and the subject.

What follows is Jerry Saltz review in New York Magazine of Tuten’s last show:

Frederic Tuten overflows with visionary scenes right out of a fecund and ungovernable imagination. Done in an awkward, assured, cartoonish hand with undertones of Arshile Gorky’s teeming amorphic graphic fields, this is pigment, shape, and scene as abstract language.

– Jerry Saltz

Text by Diego Singh, Miami, August 3rd, 2022, Miami Beach.

Frederic Tuten (b. 1936, Bronx, NY) is a celebrated fiction writer and visual artist. He studied at the Art Students League, City College of New York, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) prior to receiving a PhD in 19th-century American literature from New York University.

Over the course of Tuten’s long career, he has published five novels, including The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), and Tintin in the New World: A Romance (1993), both of which feature original cover art by Roy Lichtenstein; a memoir, My Young Life (2019) and in May 2022 a book of short stories, The Bar at Twilight.

Prior to his solo presentation: In the Fullness of Life (May 20, 2022) at Harper's New York City), he had two other solo exhibitions, Works on Cardboard (2021) at Harper’s, East Hampton, NY and Flowers, Plants, and Other Romances (2019) at Planthouse Gallery.

Tuten’s most recent book of stories with drawings, On a Terrace in Tangier – Works on Cardboard, just published by König Books/KMEC, is edited by Karen Marta, with a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Tuten, lives and works in New York City.

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