Festival 1965

Festival is part of Town’s Optical series. Characteristically, he steals features from a current style and twists them for a new purpose—here the repeated discs and lines that appeared around 1960 in the works of Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) and Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005). Town was more in tune with the organic references admitted by these Paris-based Op artists than with the geometric regularity of American practitioners. He mixes these Op art elements into a rich and dramatic fabric. The theme of festival was one he had treated in earlier paintings. Behind a foreground layer of frantic activity that evokes jugglers, strings of lights, ticker tape, and confetti, we glimpse an intergalactic darkness in which writhe twisting, faintly painted nebulae made up of dashes, waves, and “doughnuts.”

Ted Fraser, curator of Town’s 1975 retrospective at the Art Gallery of Windsor, points out the lurking connotations: “The mixing of comedy and tragedy … is very clearly defined in Festival. The lush surface of the painting with its carnival rhythms and Mardi Gras excitement belie a distant ominous space rotating upwards towards the flat surface. Here is a dark, cellular and psychological interior, a psychic storm in full force…. Town had plainly turned the tables on the decorative art of the mid-1960s and created works highly personal, extremely memorable and amazingly descriptive of perceptual and physical space.”