Poetics of Color | Fadl Fakhouri | April 2024

April 3 - 30

Opening Reception | April 6th 3-6 pm

Abrams Claghorn Gallery is pleased to announce Poetics of Color, the debut solo exhibition by Bay Area and New York based artist, Fadl Fakhouri. In this solo exhibition, the artist negotiates with color and form in a poetic manner as a way of processing their emotional jousts with the world, an eternal and persistent activity that we all engage in. The colors become symbolically charged with alternative forms of memory where form then becomes a malleable, personalized container that emphasizes not only the importance of play, but the inherent and intuitive ways that play is cultivated. Where the artist seeks to make a profound statement, however, is in how objects as simple as a watermelon can be evoked through its colors. The watermelon translates into a symbol of resistance due to its positionality between agricultural and political climates. In Poetics of Color, Fadl’s paintings remain consistent and undiluted in their representation, yet each painting changes form to explore the ever shifting quality of memory and language, providing visual poems for a complex web of societal relationships.

Artist Bio

Fadl Fakhouri (b.1997, San Francisco, CA) centers on dots, lines and color as a method of pursuing definition and positionality. Through the utility of body, images and contextualized objects, they formulate poetic statements of determination. Fadl has exhibited work at SFAI (San Francisco), A.I.R. (New York), Times Square (New York), Jacobs Institute (Berkeley), Worth Ryder (Berkeley), The Cincinnati Art Museum and The Jewish Museum (New York). They hold a BA in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.

Artist Statement

My work is guided by connecting people to the poetry of life. My work tends to be quiet and composed of few elements that I isolate and join together to make a poetic statement. The starting point for my work is typically a prompt such as “line” or “movement” which I then apply to how I feel about these terms. This involves intuition and so my work has this focus on initial affect when approaching my work. Then, one can decide to look deeper into my work to see more personal, historical narrative embedded. There are usually riddles and more than what meets the eye when investigating my work, such as a color language where red, blue and green are characters; I usually give hints so that people are intrigued and wonder, “Why out of so few elements are these put together here and in this way? There must be meaning and intention in that.”

A practice of following images, numbers and words beyond face value is evident in my utility of symbols to convey either personalized or inverted meanings. Irony finds itself in my work consistently via inversion of oppressive images. An example of this is my work, A Banned Surveillance, which put members of the surveilled Arab and Muslim populations on President Donald Trump’s list of Banned Countries in the position of surveillance and Home, an illusory door built to the scale of my home’s front door. With many of my works, there is a piece of information that must be conveyed to entirely change their interpretations; if they were to be accepted at face value, there would be no institutional or political critique. Concepts carry much of the weight of my work and I have always appreciated the stories behind results, which is how I view my artworks; they are conclusive objects, essentially functioning as data or points in a graph/narrative.

This page is under construction. Artwork in this show will be listed here soon.