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On his work (excerpts from a recent review):
For decades, before succumbing to what he calls "the irresistible challenge to explore digital art," John Fischer was the most tactile of artists, a painter and sculptor for whom direct physical contact with his materials was a primary motivator. In his long and varied exhibition history, Fischer has attracted attention and created controversy with his chameleon-like ability to change his aesthetic persona and come up with surprising and sometimes shocking results.
Although he has also been an action painter, a creator of energetic and lyrical abstract canvases composed with stains and impastos of hurled paint, Fischer is perhaps best known for creating sculptures with bread. In 1964 he had a much publicized exhibition at the Allen Stone Gallery featuring sculptures made from bagels, pumpernickel loaves, and other bread products preserved with epoxy resin, which were hailed by Art News as "serious, even elegant" and likened by Arts magazine to the still lifes of Chardin.
Fischer, who recently returned to the New York gallery scene after spending twenty years in Europe, where he exhibited widely in prestigious galleries and museums, believes that "the computer is new on the scene in the same way that the video explosion was fifty or so years ago." His recent work, says Fischer, who considers David Em, Marilyn Schwartz, and Manfred Mohr his peers, is "about beauty and vibrant musical color, geometry and bio-energy interfacing freely in a virtual realm."
The digital images in Fischer's first New York exhibition in two decades, realized as Iris prints on large sheets of handmade paper, are compositionally complex and coloristically lush. Unlike the work of many other artists who create with computes, they are distinguished by genuine painterly qualities that one normally associates with more traditional mediums such as oils or acrylics….It is their relationship to traditional painting that makes Fischer's electronic paintings more appealing than most other digital art.
Fischer, a vocal champion of digital art, as well as one of its most innovative exponents, claims that the new art form "has created a distinct visual language that permits fine art practitioners to enlarge their color vocabulary, to find new ways to transform reality, to create surreal and abstract space that is dramatically brilliant and amazingly creative." While some see digital art as "both a disappointment and a threat," according to Fischer, that perception will change, he vows, as a result his own efforts and those of other pioneers in the field.
John Fischer's ambition, it would appear, is to be in the forefront of the coming revolution in art and technology. And with this exhibition he seems well on his way to achieving that goal.
- Maurice Taplinger
(GALLERY&STUDIO, November/December 2000
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