New York
The Truth is Out There: Anoka Faruqee at Hosfelt Gallery
Anoka Faruqee‘s current show at Hosfelt Gallery, The Sum is Greater Than Its Parts, is the result of a year-long meditation on the kind of Moiré patterns – the patterns that result from placing one semitransparent object with a repetitive pattern over another – that occur via hyper-proximity to the digital.
Faruqee’s paintings are constructed using “comb-like notched trowels” that she pulls through wet paint, “kind of like raking sand in a zen garden.” (1) As the layers of colors interact, they form the optical interference that creates the Moiré pattern. Though the paintings are technically done free-hand, Faruqee’s comb tool directs her designs and makes them appear digitally constructed. The tool creates a kind of rudimentary cyborg relationship that is responsible for the work. However, Faruqee has pointedly left behind many “mistakes” that become traces of the artist’s presence. For instance, she does not tape off the canvas’ edges and there are places where her paints do not match up perfectly near the edges of her patterns.

Anoka Faruquee, "2012P-29," 2012. Acrylic on linen on panel. 22.5 x 20.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Gallery.
Most of Faruqee’s canvases range from 11.25 x 10.5 inches to 22.5 x 20.5 inches; these dimensions allow for a large white space surrounding the images which seems to crop the paintings into extreme close-ups of some screen, somewhere. Her perfect squares appear as cutouts, little keys to some absent larger image. Whatever it is we are looking at, Faruqee positions us far too close to decipher the whole from which this part is derived. The paintings allude to the promise of a far-off screen that hosts an image we might rationally understand. Totality lives out of reach, perpetually housed in the beyond.

Anoka Faruqee, "2012P-18," 2012. Acrylic on linen on panel. 11.25 x 10.25 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Gallery.
The digital precludes the possibility of touch. As we are physiologically and emotionally never able to fully grasp what we are observing, the optical illusion of the Moiré inspires a kind of tragic distance. Faruqee’s meditative, fluid practice of control, and the subsequent theorizing that surrounds her work, results in crisis as we recognize our inability to perceive. These paintings should remain mysterious, quiet, liminal: perfect glitches that signify some truth, “out there,” forever beyond our reach.
The Sum is Greater Than Its Parts is on view at Hosfelt Gallery through December 29.
(1) All quotes are cited from correspondence with the artist.