Capsule Shanghai is pleased to participate in the Disegni section of Artissima XYZ, the sector of the fair focused on works on paper and curated by Letizia Ragaglia. The platform will be online from November 3th to December 9th, 2020.
On show is a group of six new monotypes by American artist Sarah Faux (b.1986) realized during her residency at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York and unified under the project title “Insomuch”.
Working off of drawings from life, each piece is constructed from a first-person point of view glimpsing two lounging lovers trying to connect, hovering between and within each other, never quite occupying the same space at the same time. Through the cropping and closeness of the body parts, the works imply a viewpoint that is very close, proximal, where viewers are inside the same space as the bodies that they are slowly decoding.
Fast, improvised, and experimental, these prints convey the artist’s freedom in their making, morphing from mountains into heaving hairy chests, or the parting of two thighs. In The Empath (2019), an acrid green hand feels for a face that floats just slightly out of reach. Origin Story (2019) and Insomuch (2019) reflect each other, like flashes of a scene shifting in a blink of an eye. In Faux’s works, hands act as guides, like a person fumbling in the dark, navigating an emotional world by touch.
The title of the group, Insomuch, presents several connotations. “In so much”, might describe a person enmeshed deeply with someone else, similar to phrases one might use, such as “so into”. On the other hand, “insomuch” is a fragment, just like the imagery in each work. It’s a word cut away from any precise meaning – pointing inward, without telling the viewers the end of the sentence.
In their airy, non-objective nature, these prints contain snippets of gendered bodies, but resist normative ways of looking, allowing viewers to project their own sensations into what they are seeing, free from the baggage of social norms.
