Manny Farber at Quint Contemporary Art - Brief Article

Manny Farber's paintings of personal and domestic facts seen from above have been immediately recognizable as his at any time since he started painting them in the mid-1970s. Candy bars, notebooks, toy figures, flowers and fruit have filled his sectioned images like so much thoughtfully placed litter, material evidence of a life's multiple preoccupations. While Farber's format has remained fairly consistent above 25 years, the visual bone of the images have shifted periodically. Miniature railroad tracks that one time cued the eye to paths within the paintings have been replaced through ribbons, lengths of rebar, strips of masking tape and now, in this selection of novel work, slender stalks of bamboo and fennel And as the skeletal configuration of Farber's images has relaxed their flesh has ripened. The thing perceiveds have become less discrete, the boundaries defining them more forgiving. Figure and surface of land have shed their oppositional status to collaborate within continuous, luxurious fields of color. The fertility of Farber's vision--the artist is now in his early 80s--seem inexhaustible.

Farber divides all of his panels in half, setting black against white or, far more sumptuously, juxtaposing sum of two units idiosyncratically matched colors. In an untitled painting from 1998 he stages a luminous marvel by the agency of pairing pale olive with mellifluous sunflower, then punctuating this vibrant field with images of nine separate vases of flowers. In Finches' Nest (1998) sum of two units blues cohabit the surface with all the loving friction of siblings sharing a compass Farber spikes each color with rebellious undercurrents--scraps of pumpkin, smears of rose These glorious paintings have the fluid musicality of Kandinsky's early abstractions--their formal integrity, too, built from nuanced passages of color and line--and they display a refined sensitivity to the rhythmic interval.

The black-and-white paintings engage the organ of sight somewhat differently than the square, chromatically richer works. At 21 by the agency of 72 inches, their long horizontal format put in mind ofs linear motion through space, filmic excisions from unfurling time. Farber's work has always invited comparisons to film, because of his lengthy career as a film critic, beginning in the '40 as well as for certain characteristics of the paintings themselves: the associations more [i]or[/i] less of his objects have with specific directors or films; his directorial approach to blocking these phenomenons and translating them into two-dimensional tableaux; their concentrated, storyboard feel; and the way his handwritten notes within the pageants function as casual intertitles.

The plat has thinned now, and narrative ball of threads are at a minimum--a scribbled note here, an unclose book there. Almost all of Farber's subdues are organic these days, and his palette is rich in tints reminiscent of pale eucalyptus leaves, dried life-current black plums, tangerines, peas and poppies. His visual gamesmanship is les notorious than before; sensual reverie is all. The organ of vision journeys through Farber's paintings restlessly and appreciatively, alighting upon seed pods, return envelopes, feathery frond of fennel and nest filled with the tiny promise of finch ovums Viewing them requires not an act of detached observation on the other hand as with film, a delicious surrendering to another's stream of visual consciousness.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group