Be so … Paul Fryer: who says there aren't any renaissance men left?

"As horsemen fashion horses while they ride, As climbers climb a peak because it is there, As life can be confirmed even in suicide: To make is such. Let us make. And set the weather fair."

--From Autumn Sequel

by Louis MacNeice

"Be true ... take a step ... make it happen ... get out of your medium ... be a flying fish." This cocky, gritty poet from England's granite North, with his beady, appealing, lush vision, hush brown eyes, and gravel-pit voice that breaks into the thrill of song or a bolt of laughter makes light shine. He has seen it. "I have seen such things that you buggers will never understand, like a column of light." He is Paul Fryer, a messenger with crumpled tarry wings and shiny light-tan lace-ups, fragile maker's hands with bitten fingernails. He is electric muscle--he is eclectic--he is his own song. He is the man behind the music for the Fendi shows, the poet whose collaboration with Damien Hirst, Don't Be So, pushes poetry into new visuals. Right now he is working on 12-foot tuning forks that resonate the pitch of fear. Or is it the pitch of ecstasy? He doesn't know what sound they will ultimately produce. That's the point. In the making he finds his road. Then there's the big box--it looks like it's about to explode---that emanates light. And a huge electric light bulb--between the filaments, the wave of light makes you think of Frankenstein and bolts of lightning bringing things to life.

He has hooked innocence at 41. He is thrilled to the core by doing. He sings. He creates harmonies that crash and beat and ease our hearts, but he veers away from the industry's technical overproduction.

He paints--roses at the moment--in the terror of 21st-century holy wars. His courage and ache are profoundly romantic. He is a rare treasure always spinning two or three or four or five webs simultaneously, each work informing the other. Steeled by his confrontation of fear and failure, he inhabits the haunted attics of ourselves. He makes waves of light, bolts, cracking, smoking constructions that putter and phut into meaning and near-spontaneous combustion.

He rewires his 1972 Volvo. He can rig a loft and make it livable, but the most daunting battle this knight of the ether has to fight is the word. He is a poet. A lyric wordsmith. A Thomas Campion or a William Blake. A naming of things to music, to the beat, to the reach of color.

Bring on the chivalric knight and the charge to make thought felt. He alights his horse and ejects at 35 miles per hour. He falls; bloodied but alive, he secures the ultimate truth of failure--understanding.

Amanda Harlech recently collaborated with Karl Lagerfeld on his spring 2005 and couture shows for Chanel in Paris.

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