Untitled 2009

Tony Feher assembled and painted these cardboard boxes sometime in his life! I love how this work gets at the root of what art making is all about: looking and noticing. I imagine Feher, maybe in his studio, or maybe just at home, seeing these cardboard boxes not as trash, but as a kind of modular system of color. He's taken cheap, mass-produced material, and made it something precious. It's like he's saying, "Hey, look at these colors! Aren't they amazing?" The colors themselves aren't anything super special, just your basic pinks, reds, blues, and greens, but I love that the inside of each box is painted a different color. And what really gets me is the stack itself. It's so precarious! It looks like it could topple over at any moment. It's a fragile, delicate thing made out of the most ordinary stuff. And that’s the magic of art, isn't it? Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.