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Capsule Shanghai is pleased to present a new group of collages on paper by Sarah Faux from the series Trances (2020). The eight works have been accomplished by Faux while sheltering in place at home over the past weeks.
This series started with a drawing session in a friend's home, just before lockdown began in New York City. The collages are independent and complete works on their own but also preparatory sketches for larger paintings and cut-canvas collages, some of which will premiere at Faux's second solo exhibition at Capsule Shanghai in September 2020.
* Sarah Faux and Capsule Shanghai are donating 10% of all sales to Ancient Song Doula Services, which offers healthcare to pregnant and parenting women of color in the New York area, regardless of their ability to pay:
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DC: How has your work changed recently in response to the current situation?
Texts based on an Online Interview between Sarah Faux (SF) and Daniel Chen (DC)SF: I'm not sure yet. I've been more alone in my studio than I have been in years, and feeling connected to painting all the more for it. But so much is going on outside the art world that can't be ignored. The pandemic, police killings, it's overwhelming and demands our attention. And meanwhile, back in my studio, everything feels more urgent, including abstraction, including poetry.
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DC: How have collages changed the way you think about space?
An exciting development in your practice has been the development of collages that remove the figures from the confined rectangular space.SF: I've actually been making cut-out collages for quite a long time, but for years I made them in paper. That practice has greatly informed my stretched paintings and vice versa. When I isolate bodily forms, they morph into odd, lively shapes. And in a cut-out the space is an inside space, like the air space between your knees.
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DC: How are you thinking about touch?
Touch – touching oneself, touching someone else, touch in painting – and the tenderness of touch seem like prevalent ideas in your work.SF: One of the magical things about taking in a painting is tracing the artist's touch with your eyes; it can trigger all kinds of odd sensations when you follow a brushstroke across the canvas. You might feel the artist's movement, like a low-key mirror-touch synesthesia. In my oil paintings, I use images of hands to guide viewers into large fields of color. So touch becomes a way to see sensually, like feeling your way in the dark. In my recent collages, the imagery of touch is even more clear. These bodies are twisting around, looking for pleasure, folding into themselves. When we are constantly told our bodies are supposed to be productive, self-pleasure can be a small radical act.
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DC: Is there a difference to you between the act of drawing and painting?
You employ a variety of painterly and drawing techniques in your work.SF: Oo, that is fertile ground for me! Within Western art history, draughtsmanship has traditionally been valued over color. So I do a lot of line drawing in color using oil sticks as a way to blur that hierarchy. And I try to treat large oil paintings with the same reckless abandon as I would a small drawing on paper.
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DC: What is your relationship to your sketchbook and how does this process inform your other work?
You have an ongoing sketchbook practice that feeds into your paintings.SF: My sketchbook is life! It's my journal, to-do-list, notes on every book or film I consume, and then of course it's a collection of drawings from life. I draw myself, my surroundings, friends and lovers. I feel lucky that people let me draw them in vulnerable moments. Later, I'll translate those drawings, quite loosely, into my paintings and collages. If I draw people I'm close to, I have their felt presence with me while I paint even if I gradually let the imagery go.
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DC: How are you making color decisions in the recent work?
In the recent collages, one beautiful aspect is that each body part is a separate field of color.SF: My color decisions are so intuitive, it's tricky for me to break down each choice. But essentially I begin by thinking about temperature and saturation. I'll ask myself: is the emotion in this piece warm or cool? Does this twisting person feel bright and crisp, or is she feeling murky and muddy? Then I often play off a naturalistic skin tone, gradually pulling the palette into a more emotional color zone.
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DC: What does working smaller offer you?
Many of your previous works presented the body in a larger-than-life or life-size scale. The recent collages are on a smaller scale.SF: Working smaller happened at first out of convenience. I'd been ordered to shelter in place in New York and just holed up with my watercolors, so this is what came out. But every scale presents its own constraints and freedoms. These kind of just tumbled out of me, and are easy to edit and experiment with. Every cut is huge and bold on such an intimate scale.
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DC: What is your relationship to art history and how are you using or subverting it?
Visually, your paintings often reference various art historical periods such as abstract expressionism, color-field painting, impressionism, etc.SF: There's an assumed masculinity associated with AbEx painting in particular that I'm always looking to subvert. So I continually refuse to be “fully abstract” and instead cultivate a healthy friction between abstraction and imagery of feminine sexuality. Through this, I'm asserting that a woman experiencing pleasure is as deep, as abstract and as profound as the revelations of a lone wolf man dripping paint on the floor.
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DC: Do you think of the collaged figures as being (un)aware that they are being watched?
A viewer’s gaze is important in how one interacts with the work.SF: I don't think of my paintings as literal characters. Body parts structure these collages, but the end product is something much more abstract, a mass or a calligraphic mark composed of bodily elements. In that way, they function like ciphers, and each viewer engages in their own way. Ultimately it's up to the viewer to decide if they are spying on something illicit or being included in something joyful.
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Sarah Faux
Sarah Faux's paintings sit somewhere between figurative imagery and process-based abstraction. Hovering in this liminal zone, Faux paints feminine bodies in sensual situations, experiencing pleasure, pain, and everything in between. Trough cropping, Faux zeros in on specific body parts and moments of touch, pulling the audience into close proximity with her subjects. Images emerge and recede from raw, emotional fields of color. Ultimately unable to settle on a concrete form, viewers are left to ponder: do I see what I think I'm seeing?
Sarah Faux (b. 1986, Boston) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Faux received her MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in 2015. She received a joint BA/BFA from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. Faux has had solo exhibitions at Capsule Shanghai (Shanghai, China), M+B (Los Angeles, CA), Stems Gallery (Brussels, Belgium) and more. Faux's work has been exhibited in group shows nationally and internationally, including at Loyal Gallery (Stockholm, Sweden), Thomas Erben Gallery (New York, NY) and Fredericks and Freiser Gallery (New York, NY). Faux has participated in artist residencies including Yaddo (New York, NY), Cuevas Tilleard Projects (Lamu, Kenya) and The Swatch Art Peace Hotel (Shanghai, China). Her paintings have been written about in Cultured Magazine, i-D Vice, artcritical, Surface Magazine, Modern Painters, The Wall Street Journal, Hyperallergic and Artsy, among others.
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Trances, 2020
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More about the Artist
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Artissima | Sarah Faux at Fondamenta
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