Dessert Bloomers: Nick Farhi
We are pleased to announce our second exhibition with Nick Farhi. Desert Bloomers is a debut of his new western style paintings, inspired by his recent move to Los Angeles. His new series of desert life paintings has a similar approach to that of a gardener. Caring for the paintings by using hours to mix the correct colours and then applying them in thick brush strokes to unveiled bold colorfields laden with signature iconography.
Through emotive decisions found inside the painting’s brush strokes, the colors are systematically representative of how the sun distributes and produces enzymes to the unique and complexly occurring natural desert plant-life. Chemical properties, transferences of photosynthesising are scheduled by shape and color. Do these hues have mathematical significance or are they made to represent the south western hemisphere as a region of the wild?
Think about the energy of the sun, and how much of it that goes unnoticed, and is enveloped. These are simple notions. True ideas, reflective of our precious world, yet then transferred from the artist onto canvas. Hues shift into purple and into orange and into green all over the notion that plants and wildlife are the best compass, one organism feeding the rest, one molecule of sunny light at a time, and the only thermometer of uniqueness and of natural guiding light that societies can visibly depend upon. Bringing new subjects to a living in all of they’re sparseness of color, breathable form of light and of innate fiction, we present the western rendition of deserted lands, troves of sunbed, industrial void versus form and matter.
Nick Farhi (b. 1987, New York, USA), lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.
Farhi’s oeuvre has garnered an exciting reputation for questioning, and critiquing the generational ambiguity of what was known as “zombie formalism“ and for that of selecting and displaying a critical perspective of society’s flaws and beauty of imperfection. Known for a unique contemporary translation of classical art forms, the works also reflects a level of innovation in subject matter, starkly memorable, as well as conceptual in their volume in color and geometry.
His "Wine paintings," a series based on marks of oil paint made to look like wine spills, contend an almost alchemical handling of his chosen medium, as well as grant equal importance to timing and placement in his compositional strategy. As a point of political and social reference, the paintings from the series aim to reclaim a new perspective of recounting historical relationships between a figure and its union to an object. For example the Drum Paintings make novel use of an instrument’s skin as a circular structure with scuffs, while worn, are intended to be windows into human life and idyllic expression, which we have found to be one of the most central and eloquent message of the American artist's works and devotions. Much like his Racing Flags, a concept that goes from minimalism in concept pours over into maximalist output and scale by the American Painter, bringing together yet again a further progression of simplicity versus complexity in form and practice. On a purely formal level you can find clear traces of expressive brushwork like artists as Howard Hodgkin and Josh Smith. It is the spontaneous line drawing in Farhi’s late painting style, where he applying thick brush strokes to unveiled bold colorfields laden with signature iconography.
Farhi mounts solo exhibitions this and next year in Los Angeles, Brussels, Mexico City, and New York. Future group exhibitions are scheduled throughout the world in selected institutions in Asia and the West Coast of the United States.
