Reviewed by Josiah Bob Taundi

Artpoint’s Main Gallery presents Looking for Balance Between Skin and Soul, a fantastic exhibition of new, crisp multi-themed paintings that utterly delights the eye, invoke laughter and raise curiosity about the world of Calgary artist, Ferdinando “Fred” Spina.

A written and spoken word artist too, Spina read some of his interesting new poems and short stories on the opening night.

With a published book of poems and paintings, “Arctic Notes and Prairie Places,” Spina’s poems and short stories intermingle with his paintings, each art borrowing from another.  

His paintings anything from imagination to reality, from expansive Prairie and Arctic cities to the not-so-real Red cities, dogs, people to erotica.

Spina is a globetrotter. He has travelled to many cities and places across all continents of the earth. He says travel gives him a fresh perspective that help extricate himself from the mundane familiarity that blinds us from the recognizing peculiarities of our everyday situations or surroundings.

He gets ideas from anywhere, he says, his poems, travels, just driving across the street and by entertaining different ideas. Many artists do some of this too.

However, Spina goes furthest, drawing inspiration from another deeper well. He is able to go into a certain state of mind many us never knew existed, let alone exploited to create art.

There’s a conspicuous recurrence of a red house and a red city, for example, teeming with people and pets that runs through the entire body of work. It evokes a yearning in us to visit those places. But, as it turns out, those red places are, unfortunately, unphysical and unreachable.

“The Red City is something I see between when I’m asleep or awake. It’s more solid than a dream but less solid than reality,” Spina explains.

His paintings are also wickedly humorous, with names that are more of explanations than titles.

They are often lengthy and ridiculously self-explanatory, if not child-like. “Two Dogs And A Cat Walking Past People I Have Known In The Red City” depicts exactly that, so is “Two Circus Dogs Practising Their Act While Watching A Plane From The Cloud” or “Three Birds And Snake After Lunch” depicting an actual snake slithering past a red house in a lush neighbourhood while two birds are flying past overheard!

Heightened curiosity grips the viewer on yet another another piece “Two Men Approaching A Building Where Women Are Living At Large” actually showing at least 23 beautiful women of all kinds – some nude – ogling two young men passing by. Oddly, the men seem to be moving away, not towards the building.

The travels and adventures of Spina - a social worker by profession – comes alive in his pictures of lives of First Nations communities of the Arctic north, like “Big Inuit City.”

He also has a revisionist piece “Memories of Birmingham Alabama, 1963” he says was a result of his visit to the US shortly after President JF Kennedy’s historic assassination.This was also during the troubling times of the civil rights movement.

The painting depicts a group of black and white people separately waiting for a bus at the same bus stop. Blacks are in front of Big Joe’s store where “shoes for feet” are being sold while whites are on the Best Buy Clothes store side.

It’s a serious, symbolic signs of the times, that proves Spina also larger than his humour.

More information about Spina’s art can be seen on his website http://spinaart.blogspot.com  

• Looking For Balance Between Skin And Soul is running from May 7th till May 31st, 2010 at Artpoint’s Main Gallery