The geometric endless patterns of Islamic art are variably interwoven, mathematical and ornamental groups. They are repetitive, rotating, mirrored geometric patterns that can be continued into infinity; depending on their scale, they sometimes appear detailed, sometimes monumental. In the works Alignment 1 + 2 they stand for a perfect, divine whole. This principle, however, is disturbed by overlapping and overprinting, by repeated overdrawing of the “faulty” fragments until a dense cluster of lines is created and restlessness is condensed. Underneath the drawing, like a continuous monologue, are passages from Susan Sunday’s book “On Illness as Methaphor”, in which she tries to demystify two deadly diseases, cancer and tuberculosis. This text also is a close examination of a disturbed whole. Paradoxically, by naming the fear thus, a hope to banish destruction appears.

Lara Faroqhi, November 2015

The geometric endless patterns of Islamic art are variably interwoven, mathematical and ornamental groups. They are repetitive, rotating, mirrored geometric patterns that can be continued into infinity; depending on their scale, they sometimes appear detailed, sometimes monumental. In the works Alignment 1 + 2 they stand for a perfect, divine whole. This principle, however, is disturbed by overlapping and overprinting, by repeated overdrawing of the “faulty” fragments until a dense cluster of lines is created and restlessness is condensed. Underneath the drawing, like a continuous monologue, are passages from Susan Sunday’s book “On Illness as Methaphor”, in which she tries to demystify two deadly diseases, cancer and tuberculosis. This text also is a close examination of a disturbed whole. Paradoxically, by naming the fear thus, a hope to banish destruction appears.

Lara Faroqhi, November 2015

The geometric endless patterns of Islamic art are variably interwoven, mathematical and ornamental groups. They are repetitive, rotating, mirrored geometric patterns that can be continued into infinity; depending on their scale, they sometimes appear detailed, sometimes monumental. In the works Alignment 1 + 2 they stand for a perfect, divine whole. This principle, however, is disturbed by overlapping and overprinting, by repeated overdrawing of the “faulty” fragments until a dense cluster of lines is created and restlessness is condensed. Underneath the drawing, like a continuous monologue, are passages from Susan Sunday’s book “On Illness as Methaphor”, in which she tries to demystify two deadly diseases, cancer and tuberculosis. This text also is a close examination of a disturbed whole. Paradoxically, by naming the fear thus, a hope to banish destruction appears.

Lara Faroqhi, November 2015

The geometric endless patterns of Islamic art are variably interwoven, mathematical and ornamental groups. They are repetitive, rotating, mirrored geometric patterns that can be continued into infinity; depending on their scale, they sometimes appear detailed, sometimes monumental. In the works Alignment 1 + 2 they stand for a perfect, divine whole. This principle, however, is disturbed by overlapping and overprinting, by repeated overdrawing of the “faulty” fragments until a dense cluster of lines is created and restlessness is condensed. Underneath the drawing, like a continuous monologue, are passages from Susan Sunday’s book “On Illness as Methaphor”, in which she tries to demystify two deadly diseases, cancer and tuberculosis. This text also is a close examination of a disturbed whole. Paradoxically, by naming the fear thus, a hope to banish destruction appears.

Lara Faroqhi, November 2015

The geometric endless patterns of Islamic art are variably interwoven, mathematical and ornamental groups. They are repetitive, rotating, mirrored geometric patterns that can be continued into infinity; depending on their scale, they sometimes appear detailed, sometimes monumental. In the works Alignment 1 + 2 they stand for a perfect, divine whole. This principle, however, is disturbed by overlapping and overprinting, by repeated overdrawing of the “faulty” fragments until a dense cluster of lines is created and restlessness is condensed. Underneath the drawing, like a continuous monologue, are passages from Susan Sunday’s book “On Illness as Methaphor”, in which she tries to demystify two deadly diseases, cancer and tuberculosis. This text also is a close examination of a disturbed whole. Paradoxically, by naming the fear thus, a hope to banish destruction appears.

Lara Faroqhi, November 2015

A subtle wall drawing, white on white, the vinyl foil barely a millimeter thick. The shadow cast by an ornament becomes space.
My first encounter with Lara Faroqhi’s work Trace: The scissor-cut contour line impresses itself deeply into the mind, pulling one into the multilayered and complex work of this artist. Conceptual ideas and inner thoughts are combined into images. Faroqhi draws her concentrated thought landscapes in pen and ink, watercolour pen and oil. Filigree and strong, light and dense. Observed from nature, these encounters are remembered, searched for, worked over, condensed, corrected and then written over yet again. Landscapes of drawing grow in parallel with the biography of the artist herself.

Do they reveal or conceal the unknown from us that accumulates hidden within?
Traces of discourse, conscious and unconscious, of intention and accident, traced in focus or blurred. The drawings have great honesty and openness, which is very moving.
With a delicate pencil line Faroqhi spins a fine net of silhouettes across several sheets of paper. Alternating contour lines of positive and negative space, different points of view from various perspectives are superimposed, followed by energetic staccato abbreviations, traced through pastel covered paper – overlapping of inner landscapes, seismographic drawings of what is intrinsic. Every drawing is generated through the analysis of seen, reflected, experienced information into a realisation. Lines and marks become gestures, forming, or being formed into a relationship with Truth itself (not a finite but a lasting one – at least for this moment and in this constellation.)

This momentary focus on disruption already started in 1993, when Faroqhi, (who has a background in both painting and sculpture) combined spatial thinking and procedural movements, began to build a drawing machine which was partially inspired by Jean Tinguely’s apparatus: a drawing pen on a rod attached to a wheel is set into motion by a motor, writing aleatory marks onto a piece of paper, while charcoal dust is ground through a sieve. Faroqhi was interested to make the work process itself visible, thereby showing the flexibility of drawings in the making and the fact that a drawing is neither anything fixed, nor anything obvious. She calls this the “non-finite”.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, when drawing became appreciated as an independent medium, it started to be used for exploring the areas between artistic disciplines which had previously been separated from each other.
When Faroqhi studied in the 1990’s, she was thus able to declare the drawing sheet as a stage for her artistic thinking and actions in a spontaneous manner.
2009 she began making the first contour drawings. First, she took branches into her studio to draw the contour lines of the shadows they cast. Today she works with the projection of digital images, with the conscious shattering of image information.
Each drawing inscribes the artistic process – one layer superimposing on the next like a palimpsest. Faroqhi constructs patterns of a micro cosmos covering the whole surface like a grid. In the drawings on Ash or Dispersion, for example, this is found in the light-flooded negative spaces of the apparently dense foliage of the treetops, showing those areas where the light of the sky comes through the gaps. Negative spaces become positive ones, blanks are made visible and alternate with the white surface of the paper itself. In chronological sequences, Faroqhi notes the consecutive stages from opening buds to the unfolding of lush foliage. The gaps, the “in-between-spaces”, become ever smaller until they almost disappear, while remaining present. It is as if Faroqhi wants to control time or to stop the moving image – in order to make things visible which otherwise would not reveal themselves. She draws against forgetting.
In painting, it is the light which produces form, light as the beginning of every coming into form. Opposite the light is the shadow, a reduction into silhouettes. The outline that divides shadow from light dividing form from non-form.
Drawings are created in the sense of securing evidence on paper, freed from the function of representation outside of their existing and recognizable object.

Faroqhi’s drawing game configures a system of its own kind, both conceptual in structure and existing as a free gestural drawing, thereby testing the possibilities and borders of drawing as a medium. System and sensibility become form.

August 2015

A subtle wall drawing, white on white, the vinyl foil barely a millimeter thick. The shadow cast by an ornament becomes space.
My first encounter with Lara Faroqhi’s work Trace: The scissor-cut contour line impresses itself deeply into the mind, pulling one into the multilayered and complex work of this artist. Conceptual ideas and inner thoughts are combined into images. Faroqhi draws her concentrated thought landscapes in pen and ink, watercolour pen and oil. Filigree and strong, light and dense. Observed from nature, these encounters are remembered, searched for, worked over, condensed, corrected and then written over yet again. Landscapes of drawing grow in parallel with the biography of the artist herself.

Do they reveal or conceal the unknown from us that accumulates hidden within?
Traces of discourse, conscious and unconscious, of intention and accident, traced in focus or blurred. The drawings have great honesty and openness, which is very moving.
With a delicate pencil line Faroqhi spins a fine net of silhouettes across several sheets of paper. Alternating contour lines of positive and negative space, different points of view from various perspectives are superimposed, followed by energetic staccato abbreviations, traced through pastel covered paper – overlapping of inner landscapes, seismographic drawings of what is intrinsic. Every drawing is generated through the analysis of seen, reflected, experienced information into a realisation. Lines and marks become gestures, forming, or being formed into a relationship with Truth itself (not a finite but a lasting one – at least for this moment and in this constellation.)

This momentary focus on disruption already started in 1993, when Faroqhi, (who has a background in both painting and sculpture) combined spatial thinking and procedural movements, began to build a drawing machine which was partially inspired by Jean Tinguely’s apparatus: a drawing pen on a rod attached to a wheel is set into motion by a motor, writing aleatory marks onto a piece of paper, while charcoal dust is ground through a sieve. Faroqhi was interested to make the work process itself visible, thereby showing the flexibility of drawings in the making and the fact that a drawing is neither anything fixed, nor anything obvious. She calls this the “non-finite”.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, when drawing became appreciated as an independent medium, it started to be used for exploring the areas between artistic disciplines which had previously been separated from each other.
When Faroqhi studied in the 1990’s, she was thus able to declare the drawing sheet as a stage for her artistic thinking and actions in a spontaneous manner.
2009 she began making the first contour drawings. First, she took branches into her studio to draw the contour lines of the shadows they cast. Today she works with the projection of digital images, with the conscious shattering of image information.
Each drawing inscribes the artistic process – one layer superimposing on the next like a palimpsest. Faroqhi constructs patterns of a micro cosmos covering the whole surface like a grid. In the drawings on Ash or Dispersion, for example, this is found in the light-flooded negative spaces of the apparently dense foliage of the treetops, showing those areas where the light of the sky comes through the gaps. Negative spaces become positive ones, blanks are made visible and alternate with the white surface of the paper itself. In chronological sequences, Faroqhi notes the consecutive stages from opening buds to the unfolding of lush foliage. The gaps, the “in-between-spaces”, become ever smaller until they almost disappear, while remaining present. It is as if Faroqhi wants to control time or to stop the moving image – in order to make things visible which otherwise would not reveal themselves. She draws against forgetting.
In painting, it is the light which produces form, light as the beginning of every coming into form. Opposite the light is the shadow, a reduction into silhouettes. The outline that divides shadow from light dividing form from non-form.
Drawings are created in the sense of securing evidence on paper, freed from the function of representation outside of their existing and recognizable object.

Faroqhi’s drawing game configures a system of its own kind, both conceptual in structure and existing as a free gestural drawing, thereby testing the possibilities and borders of drawing as a medium. System and sensibility become form.

August 2015

A subtle wall drawing, white on white, the vinyl foil barely a millimeter thick. The shadow cast by an ornament becomes space.
My first encounter with Lara Faroqhi’s work Trace: The scissor-cut contour line impresses itself deeply into the mind, pulling one into the multilayered and complex work of this artist. Conceptual ideas and inner thoughts are combined into images. Faroqhi draws her concentrated thought landscapes in pen and ink, watercolour pen and oil. Filigree and strong, light and dense. Observed from nature, these encounters are remembered, searched for, worked over, condensed, corrected and then written over yet again. Landscapes of drawing grow in parallel with the biography of the artist herself.

Do they reveal or conceal the unknown from us that accumulates hidden within?
Traces of discourse, conscious and unconscious, of intention and accident, traced in focus or blurred. The drawings have great honesty and openness, which is very moving.
With a delicate pencil line Faroqhi spins a fine net of silhouettes across several sheets of paper. Alternating contour lines of positive and negative space, different points of view from various perspectives are superimposed, followed by energetic staccato abbreviations, traced through pastel covered paper – overlapping of inner landscapes, seismographic drawings of what is intrinsic. Every drawing is generated through the analysis of seen, reflected, experienced information into a realisation. Lines and marks become gestures, forming, or being formed into a relationship with Truth itself (not a finite but a lasting one – at least for this moment and in this constellation.)

This momentary focus on disruption already started in 1993, when Faroqhi, (who has a background in both painting and sculpture) combined spatial thinking and procedural movements, began to build a drawing machine which was partially inspired by Jean Tinguely’s apparatus: a drawing pen on a rod attached to a wheel is set into motion by a motor, writing aleatory marks onto a piece of paper, while charcoal dust is ground through a sieve. Faroqhi was interested to make the work process itself visible, thereby showing the flexibility of drawings in the making and the fact that a drawing is neither anything fixed, nor anything obvious. She calls this the “non-finite”.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, when drawing became appreciated as an independent medium, it started to be used for exploring the areas between artistic disciplines which had previously been separated from each other.
When Faroqhi studied in the 1990’s, she was thus able to declare the drawing sheet as a stage for her artistic thinking and actions in a spontaneous manner.
2009 she began making the first contour drawings. First, she took branches into her studio to draw the contour lines of the shadows they cast. Today she works with the projection of digital images, with the conscious shattering of image information.
Each drawing inscribes the artistic process – one layer superimposing on the next like a palimpsest. Faroqhi constructs patterns of a micro cosmos covering the whole surface like a grid. In the drawings on Ash or Dispersion, for example, this is found in the light-flooded negative spaces of the apparently dense foliage of the treetops, showing those areas where the light of the sky comes through the gaps. Negative spaces become positive ones, blanks are made visible and alternate with the white surface of the paper itself. In chronological sequences, Faroqhi notes the consecutive stages from opening buds to the unfolding of lush foliage. The gaps, the “in-between-spaces”, become ever smaller until they almost disappear, while remaining present. It is as if Faroqhi wants to control time or to stop the moving image – in order to make things visible which otherwise would not reveal themselves. She draws against forgetting.
In painting, it is the light which produces form, light as the beginning of every coming into form. Opposite the light is the shadow, a reduction into silhouettes. The outline that divides shadow from light dividing form from non-form.
Drawings are created in the sense of securing evidence on paper, freed from the function of representation outside of their existing and recognizable object.

Faroqhi’s drawing game configures a system of its own kind, both conceptual in structure and existing as a free gestural drawing, thereby testing the possibilities and borders of drawing as a medium. System and sensibility become form.

August 2015

A subtle wall drawing, white on white, the vinyl foil barely a millimeter thick. The shadow cast by an ornament becomes space.
My first encounter with Lara Faroqhi’s work Trace: The scissor-cut contour line impresses itself deeply into the mind, pulling one into the multilayered and complex work of this artist. Conceptual ideas and inner thoughts are combined into images. Faroqhi draws her concentrated thought landscapes in pen and ink, watercolour pen and oil. Filigree and strong, light and dense. Observed from nature, these encounters are remembered, searched for, worked over, condensed, corrected and then written over yet again. Landscapes of drawing grow in parallel with the biography of the artist herself.

Do they reveal or conceal the unknown from us that accumulates hidden within?
Traces of discourse, conscious and unconscious, of intention and accident, traced in focus or blurred. The drawings have great honesty and openness, which is very moving.
With a delicate pencil line Faroqhi spins a fine net of silhouettes across several sheets of paper. Alternating contour lines of positive and negative space, different points of view from various perspectives are superimposed, followed by energetic staccato abbreviations, traced through pastel covered paper – overlapping of inner landscapes, seismographic drawings of what is intrinsic. Every drawing is generated through the analysis of seen, reflected, experienced information into a realisation. Lines and marks become gestures, forming, or being formed into a relationship with Truth itself (not a finite but a lasting one – at least for this moment and in this constellation.)

This momentary focus on disruption already started in 1993, when Faroqhi, (who has a background in both painting and sculpture) combined spatial thinking and procedural movements, began to build a drawing machine which was partially inspired by Jean Tinguely’s apparatus: a drawing pen on a rod attached to a wheel is set into motion by a motor, writing aleatory marks onto a piece of paper, while charcoal dust is ground through a sieve. Faroqhi was interested to make the work process itself visible, thereby showing the flexibility of drawings in the making and the fact that a drawing is neither anything fixed, nor anything obvious. She calls this the “non-finite”.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, when drawing became appreciated as an independent medium, it started to be used for exploring the areas between artistic disciplines which had previously been separated from each other.
When Faroqhi studied in the 1990’s, she was thus able to declare the drawing sheet as a stage for her artistic thinking and actions in a spontaneous manner.
2009 she began making the first contour drawings. First, she took branches into her studio to draw the contour lines of the shadows they cast. Today she works with the projection of digital images, with the conscious shattering of image information.
Each drawing inscribes the artistic process – one layer superimposing on the next like a palimpsest. Faroqhi constructs patterns of a micro cosmos covering the whole surface like a grid. In the drawings on Ash or Dispersion, for example, this is found in the light-flooded negative spaces of the apparently dense foliage of the treetops, showing those areas where the light of the sky comes through the gaps. Negative spaces become positive ones, blanks are made visible and alternate with the white surface of the paper itself. In chronological sequences, Faroqhi notes the consecutive stages from opening buds to the unfolding of lush foliage. The gaps, the “in-between-spaces”, become ever smaller until they almost disappear, while remaining present. It is as if Faroqhi wants to control time or to stop the moving image – in order to make things visible which otherwise would not reveal themselves. She draws against forgetting.
In painting, it is the light which produces form, light as the beginning of every coming into form. Opposite the light is the shadow, a reduction into silhouettes. The outline that divides shadow from light dividing form from non-form.
Drawings are created in the sense of securing evidence on paper, freed from the function of representation outside of their existing and recognizable object.

Faroqhi’s drawing game configures a system of its own kind, both conceptual in structure and existing as a free gestural drawing, thereby testing the possibilities and borders of drawing as a medium. System and sensibility become form.

August 2015