Inside Farb’s studio: A Symphony of colour and space.

A few weeks ago, when I was in New York City, I had the chance to visit Adrienne Farb in her studio. Farb is a Franco-American painter based both in NYC and Paris. She has exhibited extensively in France and in the United States. A white box of sound and silence was my firts impression of her NY studio. Very modest in manner, all white walls with multiple little windows on one. Decorated with nothing but two plastic chairs, a table covered of paint tubes and all these series of paintings reverberating with different sounds, rythms and intensities. Even if the technique could seem redundant or repetitive for an outsider, unexpectedly they are all different from one another, just as you are different from your neighbour, your siblings, fathers and friends. Conversating with Adrienne helped get a deeper understanding of her work. At first I saw them as a melody, just starting out of silence, every note interacting with the others while staying unique as regard to the feeling they create in us. It is truly through the observation of contrast of color between them, with all their natural and their unnatural, and against the silencing white background that we truly perceive the uniqueness of each painting, I dare say of each individual. It's only after the conversation that I recognized these paintings as more than ismple paintings, but as individuals. Adrienne Farb has been experimenting and developping her own particular aesthetic since the beginning of the 1990's.

As history has taught us, abstraction is more often than not related with expression of feeling. Each of these paintings, as Farb kindly explained, are there to impact us, make us feel something, make us relate to them. We could perceive Adrienne as a chemist building creations out of a combination of various elements. A little blue, merged with yellow and green against a red and purple line, and so on to compose an emotionally powerful solution.  It is through the ensemble, the mix of these elements that the painting becomes alive and then tries restlessly to communicate with us.

As an example, "Becoming Night, No. 2" of 2007, instantly conveys to us a presence of itself. It is a very imposing character. Strong by the intensity of the chosen colors and of the size of the brush strokes. The 'V' shaped image on the left, the reddish stripe behind and the green stripe on the far right give this painting a strong, present foreground. Then, on the middle ground, we have that complex mix of colors, combinations we rarely find in nature. Finally, on the background, that blue stripe running diagonally from one side to the other gives a sense of profoundness and volume, as though a heavy block of emotional feeling, talking, expressing themselves and breaking the silence that sorrounds them. We could call  this painting the tenor.

 

On the other hand, we have "Fin d'ètè, No. 5" of 2006. Colors from this painting bring us a more immediate and intensive response than "Becoming Night, No.2". Whereas the previous was more solid, smoother in it's mathching of colors, "Fin d'ètè, No. 5" is more punctuated by varied zones of direrent intensities. In effect, the yellow bands, because they are contrasted with colors such as blue, purple, orange and white become more apparent and shocking than other zones of the canvas. Rythm in this composition is also of varied speeds. They start slowly and calmly with lonely blues and purples.  Suddenly, yellows, reds, and greens  heighten the speed where it reaches its intensity in the middle of the painting with a cacophony of bands of contrasting colors. To the right of the center, the bands cool down again with long and slighter calmer colors. Let's call this character the soprano.

In conclusion, as Adrienne Farb herself said "I strive for a visual choreography in my painting, the feeling of 'becoming' created by color", her art, by putting these bands of various colors, sizes and orientations create and 'become' something of their own. They become individual and independent, being there as self-sufficient and conveying their personnalities onto their viewers for them to relate to their work. I hope by my metaphors of the tenor and the soprano, that the viewer can better understand how these two paintings very similar upon the first viewing are indeed so different. Although the vocabulary is similar, the juxtaposition of forms, colors and strokes make for the two very different paintings and thus two different discourses.

Below, is a slideshow of some of Farb's work raging from from 2000 and onwards.