Cayón is pleased to present, in one of its Madrid spaces, the first exhibition in Spain by North American artists Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll, who have been collaborating since 2012.
The current co-authored work develops aspects of their respective previous individual works, such as Faruqee’s commitment to modular geometry and Driscoll’s experimentation with materiality. In the joint work, one sees varied influences; from modern artists such as Josef Albers, Agnes Martin, and Bridget Riley to the Islamic architecture of the Alhambra in Granada and North American Romantic landscape painting.
Using compositional systems, binary logic, and geometric shapes in the form of concentric rings, these paintings create illusory experiences in the form of “moirés” that are self-generated by the superimposition of patterns.
The excess flow of color around the edges, in the form of viscous paint, and various ruptures or flaws in the resulting image, are by-products of a process – carried out with special instruments – that do not distort, in their imperfection, the final result, but rather enhance and accentuate. These glitches read simultaneously as material accident, electromagnetic corruption, and traces of gesture.
"The works are not images of interferences, they are interferences themselves."
The most recent paintings introduce, in the artists’ words, a “secondary moiré“, a subtle vibratory underpainting embedded within their paintings, where each concentric circular line become sinuous.
The result is another interruption of experience that mysteriously reveals what we perceive as pure light and form is an aggregate of data in which color and drawing are confused in a way that dilutes the centuries-old Renaissance confrontation between color and design (colore y el disegno).
Inspired by the modularity of digital images, these paintings can only be fully understood in person at different distances and viewing angles, as their viewing through the printed or digital medium generates, in turn, new moiré effects that do not occur in the paintings themselves.
Faruqee and Driscoll connect, in this way, modularity and movement to the wonder and anxiety that much of contemporary life provokes: the hint of animation and sentience inside of technology.
