"In WAVES, Firouz FarmanFarmaian presents momentary meditations on the visible energy and motion of the natural world."
Zahra Faridany-Akhavan PhD
FarmanFarmaian's First Solo Exhibition at GRK Gallery's Richelieu Drouaut Space in the Spring of 2014 presenting WAVES. Poduced in Tarifa South of Spain in the summer of 2013, painted mainly outdoors facing the Gibraltar Strait and Africa, connecting with the raw energy waves of Wind, Sea and Sun.
Alongside the STRAY WAVES, COUNTRYSCAPES mini-series and the JUNKIE WAVES mural the movement embodies FFF's first dive into his Abstract exploration of the Natural World.
Exhibition Catalog Introduction
In WAVES, Firouz Farman-Farmaian presents momentary meditations on the visible energy and motion of the natural world.
Impulse and intuition erupt into dynamic visual rhythms and spontaneous sensations. Harmonic grace tames primal force as abstractions melt into physics through the illusive tension of gravity.
In a poetic engagement, colour, light, texture and shape stream together to manifest the self-realization of nature. Transcending dimensionality and material form, metaphor spatters into meaning. Allusions to landscape are choreographed by the aftershocks of subtle gesture rather than physical structure. Colours dance along ragged horizontal borders disrupting the rationalization of symmetry; and loose white paint is speckled and drizzled across the canvas.
Vagrant violets, cobalt gases and molten yellows fling forth as reds rupture and rain. Buoyant relief tracks the trajectory of paint as it descends, flirts with the suspension of time and space and rides the coloured frequencies of the atmospheric maelstrom below. The eye plunges, searching for spatial solidity in the misty dissolution of indeterminacy.
And yet an eternal calm somehow underlies these volcanic works, where every crackle, sizzle and sputter, and each exquisitely distilling drip materializes as though by happenstance. The long sensuous trails run into fervid fissures, exploding fireworks and flowers fusing in wistful harmony.
Each painting is an instinctive moment of emotional and intellectual energy. Flowing through the synapses and the fractals of consciousness, they unfold into a dialogue with nature and on into lyrical reflection. These are not descriptions. They are not representations. They are snapshots from elusive experience; raw and fleeting, of something ending, something beginning.
Zahra Faridany-Akhavan PhD