STILL LIFE PAINTINGS
For Faigin, the studio still-life provides a time-honored subject with unlimited potential to act as a stimulus for explorations of composition, color, spatial effects and the perfection of style.
No other subject matter offers the artist quite as much control over every aspect of their pictorial effect, including suggesting a narrative or developing a visual metaphor, and none has as rich and interesting a history.
"Attraction of Opposites" 24" x 30", Oil on Canvas, 1994
COMPRESSION FITTINGS
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As soon as artists mastered the art of rendering objects in three dimensions, they began experimenting with ways to subvert that same illusion. In his Compression Fittings series, Faigin creates a visual contradiction between the glittering, fully rounded vessels and the flattened space that (impossibly) contains them; things are not what they seem.
CONCENTRATED
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In Faigin's Concentrated series, lined-up, objects seem to extend further outwards as they go back in space, like a time-lapse photograph of a blossoming flower, or a growing tree. Everything is compressed visually, creating a sort of kinetic energy that also animates the imaginary city beyond.
MOVING PICTURES
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The term "still life" is even more static sounding in French - "nature morte," or dead life. What both descriptions share is the idea of the real world frozen and examined, motionless and unchanging. Faigin's Moving Pictures challenge this notion with images that suggest transition or transformation, and objects in the process of de-materializing into their original atomic elements.
STILL LIFES 1990 to 2001
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Faigin spent a decade painting the images in this Still Life series, creating invented or manipulated settings with fruit and vessels. Not all the still lifes are still, and not all are subject to the laws of gravity. The mood ranges from pastoral to apocalyptic: nothing is quite as it seems.
