Excerpt from the Essay By Ruti Director in the catalog of the exhibition “ABOUT LANDSCAPE” 2001, at the Museum of Israeli Art Ramat-Gan
The Dissected Garden, On Farideh’s Serial Landscape Painting
Who paints Landscape today? From what point of departure? Farideh enters the sensitive domain of landscape painting in a sober manner, ………. Her awareness of the gener she is operating in, makes the painting reflexive with regard to the status and the problematic character of landscape painting, and her tactics ( there are no other words to describe this ) are feminine tactics. ……. The history of landscape painting belongs almost exclusively to mail painters. ……. These are the mail painters who go out into the open landscape and transfer to the canvas a panoramic vista that stretches from one horizon to another. Women, in contrast, when they treat landscape, always find indirect approaches, through dissection and fragmentation of the panoramic view.
Farideh’s many series present all the parts of the painting (six, eight, nine) as equal in status, with no hierarchy among them ……… The dissection frequently occurs through a compulsive repetition of details – a leaf, flower, a color, a stain – and the repetitiveness itself reverberates as a law of nature. ………. In this context the compulsive repetitiveness may be interpreted as a subversive attempt to find an order in the chaos through industrious work , not through a masculine analytical approach but a feminine dissection into ornament.
Who, today, takes the risk of touching upon beauty? And yet, not enough has been said about the beauty and delicacy of these paintings. Each paper square stands in its own right as a kind of ornamental piece, a precious square that contains something of the rarity of the garden. The fine texturing of the flowers, the leaves and the colors into one another creates, or brews, the painting’s seductive quality, which causes the viewer to draw closer, to delight in what seems for a moment to be very beautiful miniatures, but then, when one is caught in the net of the magic it turns out that this is a painting that is sober, self-aware, at times almost to the point of cruelty. At the moment that a detail is drawn up out of the whole, and is repeated again and again – another red flower and another red flower – the totality disintegrates almost into pointillism, which shakes off Romanticism, and pushes aside nostalgia.
Excerpt from the Essay By Meir Ahronson in the Catalog of the Exhibition “About Landscape”, October 2001, at the Museum for Israeli Art Ramat Gan
Farideh’s art grapples with fundamental problems of modernity, but bases itself on old models of aesthetic tradition. In ideological choice , she chooses a radical option of tireless quest for the new. ……. Her detachment from a concrete landscape and her adaption of an imaginary landscape give Farideh a freedom in her untiring quest for new forms. Her recognition that every painting is an artistic representation of a given moment, and her knowledge that the time passes all the time, enable her to repeat the act of painting in a new way each time, endlessly. …….. The open landscape that Farideh deals with contains incessant change.
The conception of landscape as a sight that may be reproduced and imitated was removed from the artistic agenda in the second half of the 20th century. In what is a bold step, Farideh puts this phenomenon to the test. But together with the challenge involved in reproducing and imitating the landscape, Farideh also relates to the lexicon of artistic terms current in the late 20th century. The Grid – the linear sketching that has been so familiar – becomes in these paintings, an integral part of the landscape. The framing of the landscape-parts -each of which is totally abstract, its logic stemming only from the painting that contains the entire landscape -is done by means of light grid lines that cross the painting lengthwise and breadth wise, imprinting the sign of the modern /contemporary upon it. ……. Opposite an expressiveness that is so familiar, the restrain and the sisyphic work entailed in the pointillistic painting of the late 19th century and the early 20th century constitute a fresh breeze of testimony about a beauty that is no longer an inferior value. ……. Together with all this, we should remember that in contrast to the painting being done in modern materials such as acrylic and synthetic paints, Farideh continues to work in the oil paints that have been used by painters throughout many centuries.