Anoka Faruqee & David Driscoll: Dark Rainbow

In an exhibition of new works, Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll collaborate to create bewildering paintings devised of layers of carefully misaligned, concentric circles which generate optical effects.  The resulting moiré - the fusion of two or more patterns which create another, much more complex pattern - echoes various natural systems, such as wave formations, stress patterns, and magnetic fields.  But for the artists, the moiré phenomenon demonstrates that what we perceive as light, form and space is, at its most basic, bits of assembled data.  Pixels.  Atoms.  Nano-particles.  These paintings make the invisible tangible.

Ironically and satisfyingly, the highly intellectual process of creating these works - grounded in physics and color theory - generates supremely sensuous and transcendent paintings.

In their most recent paintings the collaborators expand their earlier techniques: applying texture upon texture and then excavating to create multiple color "channels" within an individual layer. The increased chromatic complexity creates varied shadows that simulate light moving through space.

Faruqee and Driscoll have been a couple since 1998, married since 2008, and collaborators in their painting practice since 2012.  Prior to co-authoring their moiré paintings, both painters made work that, among other things, questioned conventions of authorship and originality. 

Their collaboration, though it grew out of pragmatic solutions to process-based challenges, has become a conceptual practice that contests traditional notions of the artist as an individual with a singular identity and vision - and opens a conversation about the value of cooperation in the creative process. 

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.