- Venue
- Royal Academy of Arts
- Location
- London
The second instalment of the Artist Laboratories and Stephen Farthing is the next Royal Academia to go under the microscope. Farthing seems more in-tune with the medium he is comfortable with, painting, which produces these overtly painted canvases of Romantic proportions.
Farthing has commented that his work has “taken hold of history, tried to understand it-and then used and abused it” and this certainly becomes clear to the public, as Farthing seems to tamper with art history from a more radical point-of-view, perhaps within the same leagues as the likes of Chris Ofili. In other words, from Farthing’s own experiences, he has fallen into a Post-Modernist view of art history. For this perspective of art history, Farthing has often made reference to François Boucher and one piece in particular: Girl Reclining (Louise O’Murphy) (1752) which features in his exhibition centre-piece Boucher: The Back Story (2010). Note the somewhat Renaissance styled calligraphy and contemporary colours echoing the Rococo period that Boucher belonged to. Boucher represents François Boucher’s Girl Reclining as enlarged and viewed via a mirror with distorted imagery and writing on the picture plane and this turn’s figure abstract and gestured. Whilst the text contributes to the dimensions and volume of the painting, the work is still rather flat but Romantic. The abstract geometric forms in some of his previous work fluctuates around collection and to a spiritual degree, it feels like a harbouring of souls, especially the ‘destiny-fuelled’ A Perfect Hand (2007).
