Overview

 

We began our longstanding conversation about abstract field painting in 1998, exhibited our work alongside each other in 2005, and began developing the moiré series in 2012. The current co-authored work expands on aspects of each of our prior individual practices, including Faruqee's commitment to modular chroma and geometry and Driscoll's investigation of indexical materiality. Painting duos are unorthodox: thwarting desires for individualized identity and vision. Prior to collaborating, each of our practices challenged the essentialism of the author's hand in the history of modern Painting, thus foreshadowing our artistic partnership. 


We layer and calibrate misaligned concentric circles, amplifying them into luminous atmosphere and volume. As in perception, gradients of light and hue define both solid forms and intangible space. Some of our circle paintings present radiating conical volumes while others refer to spectrums, twilight, or perceptual after-images. Using systems of phasing and binary logic, our paintings engineer pigment and geometry into illusory experiences that provide clues about their material origins. Paint flowing over the edges and various ruptures in the image are by-products of processes that incorporate both gesture and tactility. 


The most recent paintings introduce a "secondary moiré," a confounding and sometimes nearly subliminal matrix literally buried within the paintings. These ghost interference patterns re-enact screen effects via a textured substrate: vibrating movement on a topographical surface causes each concentric circular line to become sinuous. The result is yet another interruption of experience, uncannily revealing what we perceive as pure light and form to be bits of assembled data. (You will have to trust us until you see these paintings in person because screens that you view documentation on will create their own secondary moirés.) 

 

Inspired by the modularity of digital images, these paintings can only be fully understood in person at varying viewing distances and angles. By redeeming the detritus of digital imagery, we make objects that challenge that medium's primacy while connecting modularity to the expansive presence of order within culture and nature. 

 

Anoka Faruqee & David Driscoll, November 2021

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