Towers and Bridges

Just before visiting Julia Farrer to see her latest paintings, I looked again at a drawing of hers that I have known for many years. Dispersed across it are a multitude of precise geometrical forms: slender bars, square-shaped planes, confetti-like fragments.  They have been set adrift at a variety of angles, but, apart from an accent of colour here or there to suggest solidity, they are entirely insubstantial. Space tends to flow through them, not round them. That drawing was made in 1986 – these new works are rather different. ‘Back then, I was painting the atmosphere, the air,’ says Farrer, ‘but now they are more like architecture, something that can be constructed’. The titles – ‘towers’, ‘bridges’ – bear this out, though these paintings are hardly blueprints for construction. What they allude to are the Deconstructionist designs of such architects as Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman, with their abruptly-angled walls, their folded planes, their cuts and disrupted grids. It is an architecture that has largely remained on paper, where it is often seductive; when built, it is as often problematic. Ask the curators and those charged with the maintenance of Eisenman’s Wexner Center in Ohio. But Farrer does not need to think about the functional consequences of her chosen forms. They can be stretched, warped, twisted and layered as she wishes – and in retrospect, their emergence from the drifting chaos of that 1986 drawing can seem like a logical development. Mid-way in the process, as Farrer embraced colour, the planes started to become more substantial: arrayed sometimes overlapping, in a shallow space, they were taut, translucent membranes. Now you feel that they want to become truly three-dimensional, not just illusorily so. Already projecting at times beyond the orthodox rectangle, they flex back and forward in their narrow confines as if longing to emerge into relief. The structure of these new works gives them a special resonance, as each configuration of forms is echoed in a more muted palette – a trace or a memory or a ghost. The repetition is complete in the vertical twinned ‘towers’, partial in the horizontal ‘bridges’. It conjures up a series of dualities: presence and absence, substance and shadow, day and night, while Farrer’s preferred blue-violet prolongs the nocturnal note. Introducing a steady beat, a system of measurement and order, into each of these paintings are straight lines at regular intervals, which overlay or penetrate forms (sometimes obscured by them). In the ‘bridges’ these lines extend across the surface like a stave; and such musical analogies could be pursued  for instance, the larger, coloured portion of each panel might be the full statement of a theme, the remainder its spectral reprise. Farrer brings Schönberg, Boulez, Kurtag into our conversation; a musicologist could certainly illuminate these paintings. It is likely that this show presages a new turn for Farrer: the implied relief may   soon become actual. ‘I like making things – that will solve in the making’, she says. But these present works are beautifully balanced. Formally, spatially, they intrigue you and sustain your attention – but there is more. With those dualities they crystallise, the undertow of darkness, a dimming of the light, they are surprisingly profound. 

 Andrew Mead  2002