Click Images To Enlarge
|
PATRICK FAULHABER (Am. 20th Cent.)
In his paintings of motels, bars, stores, signs, parking lots, and cars found on the streets and highways of Texas and the Southwest, Dallas-based artist Patrick Faulhaber transports the everyday world into the realm of the reverential. Astonishing in their technical prowess on such a small scale, Faulhaber’s paintings in oil on wood panels bring to mind snapshot photograph, and the ache of memory such images can produce.
Faulhaber is fascinated by light in all its manifestations, from the chlorinated depths of a swimming pool to the sun’s last rays in the vase reaches of a Texas sky, to the foggy blare of phosphorescent street lamps to the cold gleam of glass tubing. He painstakingly registers light, from neon red to icy fluorescent blue to blazing orange, controlling his color and brush to represent even the most evanescent effects of light on matter (concrete, tar, metal, vegetation) in a tour de force of representational painting.
While Faulhaber’s paintings may be small, they are huge in associations and contain within them worlds of experience, both remembered and imagined. Along with his technical achievement, such use of minute scale is a distinguishing characteristic of Faulhaber’s work. We approach these daringly unassuming objects (for they are objects much as paintings, given the wood panels’ wide widths) with unaccustomed curiosity. We look, and the scene before us deepens and expands in our eyes in inverse proportion to its scale. Challenging in radically reduce size Faulhaber’s reduced size, Faulhaber’s paintings demand a measure of sustained attention to this paradox of small size and the stunning truth to life, lifting the work from the reportorial into the realm of the contemplative.
Faulhaber’s relation to painting of the past is abundantly evident. One thinks of numerous landscape artists who focused on dramatic vistas of sky and land: the German romantics, the Hudson River school, and the American luminists and the French and American impressionists. Yet Faulhaber’s art is one that we recognize as being singularly of our own time. There is of course here the presence of photography, particularly the kind of color pictures we associate with travel that in many ways have become our diary of experience. Faulhaber, however, reaches for more than contemporaneity. With his neon stars, cowboys, bars, hotels, and highways, Faulhaber’s world is one in which the everyday realities of urban and interstate life are not denied by in fact are celebrated as icons of vibrant, glowing present.
Wary of nostalgia, Faulhaber does not edit out contemporary details, but includes them to give a full picture of the here and now. His paintings are clear-eyed depictions of a universe of light, and they act as invitations to see the world as something entirely new and other. We come away from Faulhaber’s paintings armed with a sensitivity to a beauty not hidden but simply unrecognized.
Credited: Charles Wylie, the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemparary Art, Dallas Museum of Art. This essay was adapted from the brochure produced for the Concentrations 31: Patrick Faulhaber, June 25 – September 13, 1998, an exhibition co-curated by Suzanne Weaver, The Nancy and Tim Hanley Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art, and Charles Wylie.
« Back To All Artist
|
|
|
