Sarah Faux

Critical text

The works of Sarah Faux (b. 1986, Boston) emerge from her obsessive fascination for the body, and for sexuality and gender issues. She views her work as an endless, ever-changing exploration of the physical experience of the body, both internally and externally. All her works are thus based on drawings that she makes from a first-person perspective in order to replace that of the viewer, thus establishing an ambiguous relationship of intimacy. The monotypes on display here are unique pieces made from a sheet of painted plexiglas, on which she lays a sheet of paper that is then placed under a press. We see fragments of bodies in bright colours, often distorted by a close-up perspective, in which the artist stages the subtle but ambiguous differences between the search for the objectification of the body and the body as an object. For Sarah Faux, the objectification of a body also implicitly entails its abstraction: she likes playing with the terms of abstract and figurative, which interpenetrate in her work. The play on perception and the ambiguity she seeks in terms of both form and content are also reflected in the monotype technique, which always involves a degree of risk and uncertainty in the execution and in the end result.

Text by Letizia Ragaglia