Paul Fryer

A late-nineteenth-century Western Union lineman, John Feeks, who was electrocuted after falling onto power lines in New York, is the departure point for Paul Fryer’s new site-specific installation Martyr, the only piece in his exhibition “In Loving Memory.” The work—a naked body suspended on high-tension wires that, strung between two electricity poles, bisect the gallery—has considerable aesthetic and emotional impact. Like the better-known hyperrealist artist Ron Mueck, Fryer renders anatomical details in meticulous fashion. The expressiveness of the face is realistically conveyed, although it is dulled by its medium, wax—a material that communicates the rigidity of death. The work utilizes a refined formal device meant to increase the sense of pathos. With the figure’s well-defined musculature, torqued bust, and tilted-back arm, Martyr brings to mind many famous works, from Michelangelo’s Pietà to Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat. Moving skillfully along the subtle line of contrasts—sacred and profane, moral and immoral, legitimate and illegitimate, form and content—Fryer has created a monument to modern martyrdom, an ecce homo for today, desacralized and exhibited in the form of a corpse, which, when “seen without God and outside of science,” according to Julia Kristeva, “is the utmost of abjection.” Disgust and horror are rendered here in such formal perfection that they create a disturbing experience where fear and desire, pain and pleasure, repulsion and attraction, mingle in the double-edged experience of the sublime.