Judith Farro's Work

Judith Farro lives and works in Brittany, France

Shock is not too strong a word to describe the effect of seeing J.F.'s painting for the first time. Her canvases emanate a force, a feeling of fullness, complete compositions from which nothing could be removed or added. She loves to play with lines, shapes, and size, each piece being a veritable alchemy of colors. She likes her color strong and seductive but avoids the trap of decorative painting. The manner in which she treats whites alone is revealing: initially she denies the white, covers it completely as if to avert the emptiness of the blank canvas and later goes searching for the white, making it come alive. Playing with layers and transparencies, so typical of her approach, renders her whites everything but white. Are we really talking about lyrical abstraction? The term would seem simplistic because with J.F. a stylistic concept never dominates the gesture and the raw materials.

She has, in effect, an innate sense of the substance of painting so immediate, so alive that she makes us want to caress the surface of the canvas, as she has done, with a flourish of the hand. We begin to understand her taste for varied techniques, textures, surfaces: she alternates oil, acrylic, fabric, and all sorts of papers, some of her own making. Collage is an important element allowing her to compose with contrasting forms and flat areas. She clearly enjoys wrestling with her materials and has a way of bringing back repeatedly memories, marks, and experiences, that is, time. Musical scores play a role, the visual joining the auditory: the eye listens. Thus she integrates into her work the music which gives rhythm to her daily life. Other themes, the bird, plants, the coffee cup, the couple, biblical subjects (1997 Pieta), emerge punctually, almost furtive and usually mark a new stage in that incessant coming and going between nature, the singular regard of the painter, and her interior world. All this is only a point of departure. Once the transition is established, the theme erases itself, as though absorbed into the paint. Yet, on closer look, the form, even invisible, is still present in her paintings, sometimes reduced to a simple and vague geometric shape. The work organizes itself around it.

The recurring theme of the couple offers a whole other interest, revealing the purity of J.F.'s drawing, her total mastery, the beauty even, of the gesture which inscribes itself in space. A simple mark says it all, suggesting rather thn delineating. Time thus seems suspended. Everything tends, with Judith, toward a simplification of lines, a stripping away, often not far from the world of zen, to better define the inexpressible.

Authenticity, rigor, sensuality, even fantasy fuse in her works to create a veritable lyric symphony magnified by pictorial gesture. A double light, interior and exterior, shines through them as though a stained glass, filling them with a life of extraordinary richness. Thus J.F. invites us to enter into her universe, to graft our imaginary world onto hers. A rare example of pure painting, to which it is difficult to remain indifferent.

Marie-Claire Mussat

Rennes, 1998

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