With incendiary brushstrokes that tendril in and out of the canvas, Nylander lights the paint to make the meaning of her work dissonant so to harmonize its process of discovery.

Though the lush paint seems tethered to the microcosm of the canvas, it’s ribboned to the macrocosm of flirtatious revelation entwined in the tarantism of shapes and color.

She is moved by never knowing enough, which metastasizes the fire of Prometheus from brush to sailcloth.  Morrison said true sailing is dead, so she aspires to set sail in direction of astray. 

– Mo Shahisaman

All images copyright Farnaz Nylander. All rights reserved. 

Nylander endeavors to create works that are involved in a physical discourse with the materiality, plasticity, and tactility of paint.  The boundaries of paint’s limitations are exhausted at their extreme contrasts, integrating highly thickened and thinned paint.  The paint is exploited: poured, scraped, smeared, squeezed, or dissolved into its molecular particles, manipulating oil’s versatility.  The germinality of the medium defies the prescribed methods of representing space in terms of its correspondence between surface and form, eliminating foreground-background discontinuities.  Nylander explores color and the inherent possibilities of the physicality of paint using a plethoric impasto technique, enhancing the way paint is traditionally applied.  Byaccentuating the physical act of painting and eliminating the surface-to-depth oscillation, she invites the viewer to step closer and venture up to her work at a micro level, emphasizing the desire for immediacy and intimate dialogue. Just like Dali would transfix the viewer in an altered reality through his images of the hallucinatory fantastic, her paintings portray the common, sometimes mundane reality that we are familiar with but at the microcosmic level—dissecting to re-erect in order to get lost in the wonder of our nature.

The works of artists from the late 1960s and early 1970s have become an important touchstone for her interest in painting.  Responding to the legacy of Abstract Expressionism with a playful originality, she constructs sections of her paintings with multiple layers of poured paint, and the outcomes are controlled-random results: a sense of rhythm and order that emerges out of disorder and chaos.  This provocative juxtaposition speaks to the decay and beauty nature can possess. 

These methods Nylander uses are experienced as gravitational and intend to fuse abstraction and representation, challenging the so-called death of painting so to prove that this practice is not exhausted.  She employs neither a solely expressive nor process-based style; rather, it is the chemistry that occurs in the space between the two styles that ignites her work.  The enthralling colors evoke the palette of candy counters and ice cream parlors, but simultaneously, they address the myth of perfection and allure of beauty through the materials’ unnatural and noxious makeup.  Recently, her interest has turned toward the dichotomy of attraction and repulsion: the sense of uneasiness that accompanies the intense visual pleasure of painting.