Farnaz Nylander

Nylander endeavors to create works that are involved in a physical discourse with the materiality, plasticity, and tactility of paint. The boundaries of paint’s limitations are exhausted at their extreme contrasts, integrating highly thickened and thinned paint. The paint is exploited: poured, scraped, smeared, squeezed, or dissolved into its molecular particles, manipulating oil’s versatility. The germinality of the medium defies the prescribed methods of representing space in terms of its correspondence between surface and form, eliminating foreground-background discontinuities. Nylander explores color and the inherent possibilities of the physicality of paint using a plethoric impasto technique, enhancing the way paint is traditionally applied. By accentuating the physical act of painting and eliminating the surface-to-depth oscillation, she invites the viewer to step closer and venture up to her work at a micro level, emphasizing the desire for immediacy and intimate dialogue. Just like Dali would transfix the viewer in an altered reality through his images of the hallucinatory fantastic, Nylander’s paintings portray the common, sometimes mundane reality that we are familiar with but at the microcosmic level—dissecting to re-erect in order to get lost in the wonder of our nature. The works of artists from the late 1960s and early 1970s have become an important touchstone for her interest in painting. Responding to the legacy of Abstract Expressionism with a playful originality, Nylander constructs sections of her paintings with multiple layers of poured paint, and the outcomes are controlled-random results: a sense of rhythm and order that emerges out of disorder and chaos.