Anoka Faruqee & David Driscoll: structural color

In Anoka Faruqee’s sixth exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, she collaborates with her partner David Driscoll to present new paintings from their Circleseries. These works exploit the optical complexity of interference created through the layering of misaligned patterns — turning what is considered a corruption in digital imagery into a source of prismatic luminosity and uncanny volumetric effects.

Developing out of Faruqee’s earlier Moiré series, these new paintings adhere to the consistent structural format of concentric circles. Created with notched tools raked through wet paint, their digital/mechanical appearance belies the rigorous hand-made process, but human gesture and imperfection are apparent through interruption, errata, and the thick flows of paint dripping around the edges. The ultimate chromatic and spectral effects are unpredictable and only fully reveal themselves once each work is complete. The fusion of patterns and colors creates an ephemeral condition in which the vibrations of light and hue continually change with the movement of the viewer.

Moirés have a stubborn logic that parallels various phenomena in the physical world, such as wave formations, stress patterns, and magnetic fields. The overlay and subsequent visual fusion of two or more offset patterns creates another pattern that is quite unlike and much more complex than any of the components. In this group of works, the phenomenon of interference not only exemplifies the plasticity of perception, but also models the dynamism of the physical world.

Anoka Faruqee was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and directs graduate studies in painting and printmaking at Yale School of Art. David Driscoll was born in Wintersville, Ohio. They live and work in New Haven, CT.