Fortune

The curatorial and editorial project for systems, non-objective and reductive artists working in the UK

Fortune has our eyes | Julia Farrer

An essay by Brendan Prendeville

May 2024

Can I say what I see? Without question, ordinarily: here’s the bus now, that’s George over there. When it comes to painting, though, we can’t use our vision simply to recognize and identify, even perhaps in straightforward terms (“Is this a painting?”, Jackson Pollock is said to have asked Lee Krasner, as they looked at his spattered canvas spread on the floor). Writing on Velazquez’s Las Meninas, Michel Foucault remarked how, given the sequential nature of syntax, “what we see never resides in what we say”. Art-historical scholarship, he noted, avoids the difficulty by limiting itself to such tasks as identifying the individuals portrayed, while ignoring those features of the painting that most fascinate and perplex our attention, hard to describe as they are.

These new paintings by Julia Farrer, being abstract, give me no recourse to simple identification, in avoidance of their very evident perplexities, their particular hold on attention. I’m looking at Un Coup de Dés I, from the series whose title holds a key to the exhibition as a whole. I see a floating array of box-like forms, open at top and bottom so as to interlink, and sometimes intersect, producing an illusion of projection in space, an illusion enhanced by virtue of the artist’s having cut the plywood support to follow the edges of the formation, with the effect that the imaged forms, at their outer limits, appear to cast shadows on the wall. (In versions II and III there are inner openings too.) Yet the illusion is dispelled at once by exactly the same means, once we see (perhaps simultaneously) that it is the flat plywood shape itself that casts the shadow, Farrer having attached a smaller piece cut to the same profile to make the painted surface stand forward from the wall.

This is a painting that presents itself as a construction. Colour plays a part in distinguishing each quasi-spatial form, and it engenders further illusion at the same time. Two of the box forms appear as if illuminated from within, due to the painter having graduated their respective hues from the centre of each side or band out to either edge, with a glowing effect, enhanced through association with the uniformly white ‘box’ and in contrast with the grey one, nearly monotonal save for a shade-like darkening at either end. A redoubling of illusion, then, even as it undoes itself in our perception of the physical facts. This duality as between what we see as actually there and as not really there, while it inheres in the very medium of painting, has a particular bearing on abstract painting and its critical history.

American painters of the Minimalist era, most notably Frank Stella, took measures to confine painting strictly within the bounds of its materiality: as when Stella applied colour in regular bands reiterating the shape of the canvas, to the end, as he put it, of ‘driving out illusion at an even rate’. Whether or not he succeeded in this aim, the philosopher Richard Wollheim held that the intention itself was at odds with the medium, which, he argued, depends essentially on a human perceptual faculty specifically enlisted by painting, one that he termed ‘seeing-in’. If I look at a wall, I see it as simply there facing me; if I look at a stain on the wall, I both see it as a physical presence and also may see in it imaginary things not actually there. Even abstract configurations of colour may elicit such ‘pictorial seeing’, for example where juxtaposed hues might appear to ‘pull’ against each other, in mutual intensification and contrast.

In Julia Farrer’s paintings, contrasts and gradations of tone and hue play less a dynamic than an elusive role: they at once define and transgress the distinct elements of configurations in whose lucid geometry we find no logical resolution but instead a playful invitation to lose our bearings. In Crossing Place, a ring in pale orange hues passes through, as if linking, the openings of two long black boxes, tilted along opposite diagonals as if into depth; lighter box formations transparently intersect the dense tone of the black boxes, crossing through their openings. The more I look the harder it is to locate that ring spatially, or follow the intricacies where the formations cross and intersect, so I let go of the leash and let my eyes venture as they will. In thus relaxing my grasp I may follow where the artist has led, in her venture of chance, using random sequencing and computer manipulation to sustain a free-flowing dialogue with each work in process.

There is a sense of discovery here, of fluent invention: through all the variants of Un Coup de Dés, or in the longitudinal formations which hang (Angel) or tilt (Pendulum, Point of Balance); in the pale-hued cluster comprising Still Light, or in the sober angular intersections of Stone Garden, neutral and low-keyed with a pale orange segment. ‘Each thought is a throw of the dice’: Mallarmé evokes the chain-reaction that take place when an artist follows a fresh vein of invention. We in turn follow our own thread of discovery, in front of each painting as well as between them, as our eyes unfold the surprises they hold in store. Neuroscientists have found that walking down an unfamiliar street has a rejuvenating effect on the mind, owing, I suppose, to the keying-up of our attention in its encounter with new experience: alert anticipation as to what might come next, what might be around the corner. I think of an infant I saw in a café the other day, its eyes round in continual surprise, latching onto a woman who came into its view and turning its head to follow her as she walked on. The condition then is that we feel we are learning or finding something, making sense anew: very different therefore from something else I saw just recently, a vast digital display in Tottenham Court Road, generating continually changing images, in front of which a large crowd stood in a daze.

Traditional images of the goddess Fortune sometimes show her travelling with the wind, drawn by a sail, her feet on a globe. In our surrender to these paintings, Fortune has our eyes.

Un Coup de Dés I (2023) Acrylic on birch plywood, 43 x 112 cm

Crossing Place I (23) 2023, Acrylic on birch plywood, 49 x 170 cm

Angel 2023, Acrylic on birch plywood,

80 x 63 cm

Still Light (Life) I 2022, Acrylic on birch plywood, 47 x 58 cm

Stone Garden (2020) Acrylic on birch plywood, 52 x 60.5 cm

This essay was first published in the Art Space Gallery Catalogue ISBN 978-1-7-384870-2-8

Julia Farrer :: A Throw of the Dice :: Exhibition 6 September – 18 October 2024