Essay by Dalia Manor in the catalog of the exhibition: Farideh, Oil Paintings “Israel Experience’ , at the Gallery Gimel, Jerusalem, August 1989.
In her recent series of paintings, FARIDEH returns to the traditional artistic subjects, such as landscape, a bowl of fruits, or a vase with flowers, with which Farideh has been preoccupied in the past few years. But now all the motifs appear together, in dispersion, given equal status and different proportions, side by side, one above the other, as a kind of ” “inventory” of motifs and styles.
These combinations disrupt the illusion of pastoral innocence of each of the parts, which are presented as autonomous paintings, some framed within distinct boundaries, others floating in the paper`s white space, or even virtually absorbed into it. They become spots in an abstract composition, like a collage of color full postcards glued on the board.
The link between the elements is not immediately apparent. It is there in the delicate coloration of all the parts, in the light touch of brush and in the aquarelle transparency which Farideh crates in the oils. It also exists in the type of motifs she chooses, all charged with a symbolism of plenty and sensuality, of a mythic world; an artificial beauty which exists in the imagination.
Among the identifiable images there are also abstract spots, framed as a picture within a picture. Horizontal brush strokes create the illusion os sea or a desert, palms stand on either side of the abstract sections. Is this a landscape or just a color blurb disguised as a landscape? Is the colored square another open window or it is an opaque painted surface concealing something else beneath?
The beauty which radiates from the paintings deceives the viewer with its patent artificiality, with the breaking up of the images like a text broken up into verses or words, each having its own meaning ( or meanings ) but also the possibility of acquiring a different meaning in a new context. Farideh`s context does not create a new ” story “, but leaves the words split up in a relationship that allows a mutual illumination and makes it possible to begin reading from any point. The braking up does not create chaos but a different order, rooted in the color harmony, in the division of the surface into geometric units, in the finding of a focus or a number of linked focuses. The organized scattering of the images creates changing associative sequences, focusing the viewer to skip among all the “pictures” of the painting, and to solve the “riddle” that the relations among them create.
Dalia Manor is an Art Critic and Executive Editor of the Art Magazine “STUDIO”, Israel.