Capsule is delighted to present Trampler, an exhibition of oil paintings and cut-canvas collages by American artist Sarah Faux (b. 1986 in Boston, USA; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA). Faux has spent years painting bodies in the tumultuous act of self-assembly, putting intimate scenes onto canvases of grand proportions. Her improvisational style abstracts human forms almost to the point of dissolution, allowing sensation, gesture, and color to dominate her portraits of selves-in-progress.
In Trampler, Faux explores how we aren’t just made of our own desires, we’re also formed by the desires of others. In this exhibition, her subjects are defined by their clearly rendered fetishistic adornments. Shoes, rope, bras, and underwear give these bodies shape. But beyond these forefronted objects of desire, Faux has hidden voyeurs. Some she implies through ambiguous points of view, others she camouflages within swaths of color.
In Trampler’s titular piece, an oil painting on two unevenly sized canvases, a larger panel depicts high-heel clad feet striding confidently across the frame. Gradually, a man emerges below them: reduced to inanimacy, he is the smeared beiges and blues being tread upon. A question emerges: who has the power in this scene, the looked at or the looker? A smaller panel on Trampler’s right-hand side shifts these power dynamics further. Thick, crimson arcs evoke blood splatter, the man’s grasping hand, a rooster’s comb, or some subconscious excess in the painting that ached to spill out.
In Peep-toe, a hanging double-sided collage, differing perspectives physically merge. On its front, Peep-toe assembles warm-toned canvas segments into a high-heeled shoe. On the reverse, scrawls of neon yellow blare across the shoe’s black silhouette. With effort, these lines resolve into sketches of restrained hands and kicked up high heels. By pasting these two sides together to form a single floating sheet of canvas, Faux conjures a kinkster for whom the shoe and the domination fantasy are inseparable concepts. In having the viewer parse out that fantasy, we become complicit in their fusion.
With pointed ambiguity, Trampler playfully challenges us to examine our interpretations of the pieces it presents. “What are you looking at,” these works seem to ask, “and did you make it so by looking?”
Text by Masha Strasburger
