Contributed by Christopher Stout / Over the past 15 years, Patricia Fabricant has experimented with distinctive heroic elements within her work, some figurative and some that seem to be extracted from nature. “Horror Vacui,” her solo show at Equity Gallery, presents 26 inventively patterned gouache paintings that follow the conceptual approach the show’s title – meaning “fear of empty spaces” – suggests, filling the entire surface with detail and composition. There is a link between these paintings and the early Modernist ones of Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz, both of whom Fabricant praises in her artist statement. While divergent in line and shape, the work of all three painters radiates curious vibrational energy. Some of Fabricant’s new pieces pull viewers in while others push them back. I asked her three questions inspired by the new show and informed by years of appreciation for her work.
Christopher Stout: You gave a talk at the E32 art crit group in 2011 in which you explained how gouache was becoming the dominant medium in your work. Please expand on your relationship with gouache and how it enables your practice.
Patricia Fabricant: I am completely self-taught in water-based media. I had been working in watercolor and then saw a two-gallery show, curated by Geoffrey Young, called “It’s Gouache and Gouache Only.” There were 70 artists in the show and it was life-changing for me to see the range of work using gouache as the medium. I went straightaway to Pearl Paint, bought some gouache and have not looked back. I love that it can be transparent or opaque. This current body of work uses Acryla gouache, which is acrylic-based, because it layers beautifully. “Designer gouache” tends to pick up a bit when you try and paint over it. Acrylic gouache provides a sturdier surface.
CS: I’ve been exploring different bodies of work within your painting archive to identify unifying stylistic agents. They include a consistent family of warm pigments and a related family of cool pigments. You have a signature palette. Please share a few words about how you experience and deploy color in making your work.
PF: I think what unifies my work across the range of subjects, from portraiture to abstraction, is my use of strong color. I have experimented to some extent with trying to balance strong colors with a more neutral palette, but I keep coming back to the bright ones. I likewise often play around with limiting my palette in an individual work, and I am continuing to explore this idea, but I find myself nevertheless drifting back to brighter more varied colors. Roberta Smith once told me I was an excellent colorist. I’ll take that.
CS: Other unifying factors within your work would be lines and ribbons and holding shapes to form more extensive pattern mosaics. These specific elements are also utilized together to accomplish the radial symmetry abstraction in the works in “Horror Vacui.” What’s your perspective on the dialect you have created with lines and shapes?
PF: I have worked with these forms a lot throughout my career. I remember seeing a painting of Fred Tomaselli’s at the Brooklyn Museum where he used a sinuous, serpentine line, similar to a Greek meander, and I thought: I can work with that. I began by using the line on a white or solid ground, playing with positive versus negative space, then went more dense with it, creating all-over patterns. The shapes came later, but I think in the most successful pieces it becomes hard to determine what is on top of what, the underlying shapes or the overlaid ribbons.
“Patricia Fabricant: Horror Vacui,” Equity Gallery, 245 Broome Street, New York, NY. Through November 23, 2024.
About the author: Christopher Stout is a queer abstract reductive artist based in New York.
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Patty you have answered the questions thoroughly and distinctively. I am so glad to see you receive this review, especially at the beginning of your exhibit
For me your work scintillates and vibrates in an almost hypnotic fashion Your ability to lay colors so close to each other and yet maintain the distinctive qualities of each is extraordinary
Mazel Tov