Manny Farber at Quint Contemporary Art - Brief Article

Art in America, Oct, 1999 by Leah Ollman

Manny Farber's paintings of personal and domestic objects seen from above have been immediately recognizable as his ever since he started painting them in the mid-1970s. Candy bars, notebooks, toy figures, flowers and fruit have filled his segmented images like so much thoughtfully placed litter, material evidence of a life's multiple preoccupations. While Farber's format has remained fairly consistent over 25 years, the visual bones of the images have shifted periodically. Miniature railroad tracks that once cued the eye to paths within the paintings have been replaced by ribbons, lengths of rebar, strips of masking tape and now, in this selection of recent work, slender stalks of bamboo and fennel. And as the skeletal structure of Farber's images has loosened, their flesh has ripened. The objects have become less discrete, the boundaries defining them more forgiving. Figure and ground have shed their oppositional status to collaborate within continuous, luxurious fields of color. The fertility of Farber's vision--the artist is now in his early 80s--seems inexhaustible.

Farber divides all of his panels in half, setting black against white or, far more sumptuously, juxtaposing two idiosyncratically matched colors. In an untitled painting from 1998, he stages a luminous marvel by pairing pale olive with mellifluous sunflower, then punctuating this vibrant field with images of nine separate vases of flowers. In Finches' Nests (1998), two blues cohabit the surface with all the loving friction of siblings sharing a room. Farber spikes each color with rebellious undercurrents--scraps of pumpkin, smears of rose. These glorious paintings have the fluid musicality of Kandinsky's early abstractions--their formal integrity, too, built from nuanced passages of color and line--and they display a refined sensitivity to the rhythmic interval.

The black-and-white paintings engage the eye somewhat differently than the square, chromatically richer works. At 21 by 72 inches, their long horizontal format suggests linear motion through space, filmic excisions from unfurling time. Farber's work has always invited comparisons to film, because of his long career as a film critic, beginning in the '40s, as well as for certain characteristics of the paintings themselves: the associations some of his objects have with specific directors or films; his directorial approach to blocking these objects and translating them into two-dimensional tableaux; their concentrated, storyboard feel; and the way his handwritten notes within the scenes function as casual intertitles.

The plot has thinned now, and narrative clues are at a minimum--a scribbled note here, an open book there. Almost all of Farber's subjects are organic these days, and his palette is rich in hues reminiscent of pale eucalyptus leaves, dried blood, black plums, tangerines, peas and poppies. His visual gamesmanship is less overt than before; sensual reverie is all. The eye journeys through Farber's paintings restlessly and appreciatively, alighting on seed pods, return envelopes, feathery fronds of fennel and nests filled with the tiny promise of finch eggs. Viewing them requires not an act of detached observation but, as with film, a delicious surrendering to another's stream of visual consciousness.