Laura Fayer's mixed media paintings are inspired by observations of landscapes, nature, and impressions from daily observances. Fayer approaches her work with a loose sense of structure that is interjected with intuition. Beginning with aqueous pools of color, she slowly builds each painting using successive layers of media. Acrylic washes are overlayed with collaged rice paper markings inspired by ordinary objects and experiences; branches, shadows on sidewalks, pooled water and foliage inform her pattern-making, which she creates using hand-made printmaking tools.
Without a preconceived notion of how the paintings will resolve, Fayer allows her imagery to gradually emerge. By building successive layers of media, Fayer allows certain areas to recede beneath veils of rice paper, and embraces imperfections and accidental relationships. Areas of rice paper are allowed to wrinkle and jostle, while others are kept crisp and map-like. Fayer's marks slowly gather into gently undulating compositions, resulting in a series of paintings that offer levels of interpretation, but are ultimately defined by impermanence, visual economy and intimacy.
"I participate in a delicate balancing act between creating something complete and ordered, with leaving just enough imbalance and disorder to give the work a subtle beauty," the artist states. "This allows the viewer to experience the movement, rhythm and ambiguous transitions as the painting comes together as an embodiment of naturalistic form."
Laura Fayer is a graduate of Harvard University in Visual and Environmental Studies and holds an MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York City. She lives and works in New York City.
Throughout the course of her career, Gretel Stephens has navigated spatial and figurative relationships within abstraction. As the formal center of her work shifts with each body of work, her interest in scale, space and material integrity remain consistent. All of her work comes from careful consideration of subtlety and small gestures that ultimately present themselves with a luminous presence - whether she is considering movement within softly rounded forms on the verge of melting into smoky grounds; or her more minimal works, whose soft edges brim with inner light; or more cosmic-centered imagery that appears to capture dramatic cosmic explosions.
For this new body of work, Stephens continues her process of dry-brushing layers of oil paint over linen surfaces. Numerous thin applications of paint allow the surfaces to remain open and penetrable, but always with subtle shifts and visual vibration. The artist refers to her palette in terms of birthstones: topaz, moonstone, sapphire, etc. The hardness that the reference to stone conjures, and the vast accumulations of paint involved in the production of the work belies the ultimate levity of Stephens' gently shimmering colorfields. While the paintings are generated with a focus on material relationships, the paintings consider both physical and conceptual limits and ephemerality. The radiance of the work induces metaphorical readings, while allowing access to infinite permutations within color.
