Faba

Polyphonic Abandon in the Work of Faba
By D.F.Colman (copyright 2007)

Fired by an elemental understanding of the flow of the unconscious, Faba’s polyphonic paintings have a thoroughgoing sense of elegance and grace. In her Abstraction Series Faba activates the picture plane with just the barest flicker of an internalised intensity, a slow burn of recognition ignites the imagery due to the artist’s incremental (and often extremely gingerly) layering of her brushstrokes and incorporated objects. Once applied in what appears to be a mental state of nuance control the artist’s colors and febrile contours take shape within Faba's worlds in which horizons, edges and the unseen world in general is manipulated in order to get our imaginations moving. The result is electrifying. Art, like life, rests within its details and Faba has a strong grasp of the importance of applying contrasts in her work in order to jump-start the imagination of the beholder.

In works such as Abstraction Series #1 where the saturated picture plane is filled with surges of energetic and involutes brushstrokes the artist has produced an imagistic rendering of dots and striation strewn against an undifferentiated color filled background. The renderings of shapes and outlines which might generally be related to the retinal recognition of objects in Faba’s work might be seen as equivalent to Sartre's imaginative consciousness. As he states in his The Psychology of the Imagination, it presents itself as a spontaneity which produces and holds on to the object." By contrast, Faba’s diffused background on which rests her slightly undulating, patterns may be seen as equivalent with Sartre's "perceptual consciousness" in which it is characterized as appear[ing] to itself as passive." The interplay between both forms of knowingness produces spontaneity which saturates Faba’s Abstract Series with a soft and bright intensity.

Faba charges her work with intimations of play and poignant longing for time passing. There is a metaphysical sense of anxiety that pervades this moody work in which implied oppositions are put into play. The suggestion of eternal recurrence, so valorised by Nietzsche in his "Ecce Homo", seems particularly noteworthy in this work. Here the affirmation of passing away and destroying and the implication of the unconditional and infinitely repeated cyclical course of all things pervades this imagistic painting. In Abstract Series, what is perhaps her most enigmatic work, Faba's attempts to conflate the space of representation with that mysterious non-mimetic "other space" assigned to the mystery of looking itself. The role of a collective unseen, therefore, is played against that which is demarcated and denotated. A slippage of yet complementary viewpoints predominates in these remarkable works as a quality which Gombrich calls "perceptual intersubjectivity" prevails.

This intersubjective bias, (as Merleau-Ponty describes it) means that each and eve...

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