"RÊVERIE" NICK FARHI: Paris

Stems Gallery is pleased to present Nick Farhi’s debut solo exhibition in France Reverie, featuring ten paintings of urban landscapes in New York and Mexico City.

In Farhi’s paintings of rainfall in city streets, nearby light from street lamps, cars, and storefront neons refract through a fabric of street water. In a deft manipulation of oil paints, Farhi uses a glowing palette of colors that the artist has been mixing himself for the past decade. Shunning a classical dependency on primary and non-bespoke colors, Farhi’s paintings depart from a loyal representation of their surroundings to become unique worlds of their own. 

Painted on aluminum board, the work glistens with a sharp opulence, turning the gritty streets of New York—into beautiful, resplendent pools. Conjuring both a quiet stillness amidst a bustling city, as well as a placid body of water for reflection, Farhi’s city scenes inspire contemplative reverie. 

Farhi’s paintings both emulate the truncated view of reference images sometimes taken with a cellphone or snapshot camera to emphasize a subjectivity in each composition. Each twirling with entry points of the artist’s imagination, and a voyeuristic perspective of the city land.  The framing of Dante’s respite and Arcades and exits prompt the viewer to imagine the surrounding landscape in which these views appear. Some hung low to the ground, uniquely toy with the boundary between the real and the imagined by acting as a window or extension of the material world around it. They present as screens or portals to a world beyond. 

Up close each raindrop and ripple is individually legible, yet from afar the puddles and pooling water appear like an impressionist blanket draped across an urban scene. The perspective shift demanded of Farhi’s paintings connote a similar transference between the individual mind and a collective consciousness. Serving as memorials or odes to a frenetic urban cosmos, Farhi’s paintings capture both the material world and its mindset, the experience of traversing a space and being both singular and multiple all at once. 

—  Victoria Horrocks