Unabashed exuberance and “a lot of water”
In conversation with Nadine Faraj on her artistic process and new series ‘Pink Moon People’ | On at McBride Contemporain Gallery from Nov 18- Jan 15, 2021-22
I met Nadine virtually, this placed her in her Montreal studio after a long day of climbing up and down ladders to prepare for her show ‘Pink Moon People’ at McBride Contemporary.
Her day had comprised of meticulously painting the walls of the gallery in a subtle warm grey or ‘light mist’ as she called it. Fatigued, she still provided me with a welcoming calm and generous energy. “The grey looks like nothing” she says as if sharing a secret, “but it’s everything. It has a natural hue that takes over and produces a calming effect– like a whisper.”
Not unlike the liberated figures in her watercolour world, Nadine compels her audience to merge with their environment, encouraging energetic auras to mingle with their surrounding atmosphere and vice versa. The tone is set and the gallery walls unobtrusively announce a varied tempo from the norm, “– like they are sucking you into their world and you can just be transported. Its hypnotizing.” This characterization is also fitting to prevailing qualities in Nadine’s own artworks.
Her paintings depict a lively cast of personalities unbound by any defined linear outlines. Skin, bodies and backgrounds bleed into one another, exuding colour pigments beyond their perimeters, creating a unified and pulsating whole. The works are strangely utopic in their unbridled strangeness and liberal gesture while somehow living in a controlled space in which incident has been sanctioned masterfully as a part of the universe’s natural order.
Faraj’s compositions are created almost exclusively by applying wet on wet watercolour paint on paper. This effect requires a deft hand and instinct, existing between the quickening moment of the paintbrush’s watery first mark and everything seizing up to dry thereafter. This technique has been evolving in her work for the last three to four years. She had visited a De Kooning show at the MoMA NYC and returned energized, “… a lot of water,” she recalled thinking “I need a lot of water… and then I stopped tracing the outlines of figures. Colours of the body would move into the background and the background into the body. This was the vision I had.”
Dancing with the paint’s drying time is a process-based concept that cultivates several ideologies explored in Faraj’s work, for the time being, we’ll keep it light with universal ambiguity and the sublime. Just kidding.
Though talk of ‘ambiguity’ in art is not new, it is precisely this that brings an indistinguishable humanity and tension to Nadine’s process. Society routinely insists on conformity, an evasive and inhospitable standard of maintained constancy, though life as we all know is in contrast, ever changing, uncertain and wild. Ambiguity itself is uncertainty, not simply a descriptor for swayed abstractions or a lack of representation in art. It is the feeling of the threshold, that of an apprehensive willingness and excitement teetering on the instinct to escape. ‘The sublime’, discussed since the times of ancient Greece, delves philosophically into this inherent human experience relating to the subtlety and fullness of our emotional capacity in response to our environment.
Pushing against an intrinsic self-censorship to let go, every individual artwork is an honest exploration into the oblivion of the blank canvas, presented as it is without correction or interference. The staged limitations of these wet-on-wet paintings parallel that of a live performance emphasizing immediacy and the aptitudes necessary to navigate it. A visual choreography is rehearsed privately, the artistry steadily tuned, “… but if it doesn’t work out, a sheet goes out and I start again.” Though she fondly refers to these practice works as her ‘rejects’ Faraj acknowledges that they are an essential part of growth within her practice. This “feeling around in the dark”, is “faith that you will stumble across what you are looking for.” Moreover, they are a consenting submission to the sublime unknown and the emotional rollercoaster that goes along with it.
In her current series ‘Pink Moon People’, Faraj celebrates the sublime as an aspect of freedom in and around the human nude. Exploring the undeniable fluidity of sexuality, associations to the body as a carnal and physical entity are no longer separated from that of a mental and spiritual one. Her characters expose their appetites for personal exuberance, whether joyful or trepidatious, all raw psychological states are encouraged. The titles, many of them inspired by Sufi poetry and teachings by Rumi, reflect a regeneration of creation myths, as if to imply that the world is in a constant state of renewal. Forget what you think you knew and find delight in learning from your current curiosity, or as stated in one of my favourite titles, ‘What You Really Want is Love’s Confusing Joy’.
Nadine’s ‘Pink Moon People’ guard that safe place where viewers can rediscover pieces of themselves reflected in each artwork. They are a reminder that variance is in stunning abundance and all that lags behind is our perceptive ability to interpret it openly and unabashedly.