Untangled

Percy Fortini-Wright: Entangled Lines at the Copley Society of Art

by Shem Tane

Using acrylic or spray paint, the art style of Percy Fortini-Wright’s, whose “Entangled Rhymes” exhibition opened last Thursday, Oct. 8, at Boston’s Copley Society of Art, focuses on the background of the urban environment.

His latest works are heavily rooted in black and white contrast and how each color interacts with each other; graffiti has been one of his main influences in his catalog of work. In creating one piece, “My Left Hand Stuck in the Matrix, I’m the Apex I steal Science off Spaceships,” he said that he strived to combine, “the feeling of order and chaos.” The perspective of the piece is slightly distorted, with the diagonal border between the cityscape and the checker floor. The perspective itself also creates the image to be compressed, yet expansive with the collection of random brush strokes giving the piece a sense of disorder.

Another piece that caught my eye was the darker version of “Untangled Rhymes.” The individual brush strokes colliding with each other created a plate of layers on the canvas. Fortini-Wright told me that a piece like this wouldn’t take that long to paint, but he would constantly add more strokes throughout the “finished” piece. He also talked about the impact that Boston and the urban environment has influenced his style. The backdrop of a city is found in most of his pieces and is a theme that he keeps drawing from – the balance of control and chaos, which is found in the groundwork of a city.

The final words Fortini-Wright left me with were that “What we define as negative space and how black and white isn’t as clear as we thought it was.”

(“Percy Fortini-Wright: Entangled Lines” continues through October 28 at the Copley Society of Art, 158 Newbury St., Boston, Mass. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. and on Sunday from noon-5 p.m. For more information, call (617) 536-5049.)