The Hydroponic process serves as a metaphor for painting for the artists in this exhibition. Paint is the fluid medium in which ideas are floated, grown, sustained and cultivated. Faber, McMahon and Rizzo explore an abstract language rooted in painterly experience and observational discovery. Calculated elements of suggestive shapes and forms counterpoint spontaneous actions and decisions that emerge and dissipate within an ever-changing fluid field. Color is experienced both physically and theoretically. The paintings reference or defy gravity as the process is called into question.

Painting to Jonathan Faber is a physical thinking process––a way of getting involved in a kind of internal dialogue. Faber is engaged in making works that are primarily abstract but are also connected to a lexicon of real-world imagery. In each painting, there is a negotiation of extremes––a friction between concept and intuition. The artist finely balances methodical and immediate approaches to each image as they undergo a process of formation and deformation, destruction and reconstruction.

 Faber’s approach to making pictures is rooted in his passion for the process of painting, specifically a strong desire to stretch the syntax of the medium. Although the process can be similar in each image, it is his intention to make each individual painting singular, as an entity with its own idiosyncrasies that creates an ever-changing complex experience.

Stephanie McMahon’s paintings extract and distill her observations and perceptions of a particular environment while presenting the possibilities of visual experience and abstraction. Weaving in and out of referential forms, colors and elemental shapes, she allows for both intuitive and calculated responses. Gestural brushstrokes impart physicality yet glide weightlessly over smooth surfaces as figure ground relationships oscillate and conflate. Geometric structures and sharp edges provide a counterpoint to the immediacy and speed of the gesture. Her process creates an active space for exploration that connects the present activity of painting to a previous experience. 

The paintings are made with thin, translucent layers of oil paint on a smooth oil ground surface allowing each brushstroke to have a vibrant and luminous physical presence with very little material body. McMahon embraces the immediate and sensual qualities of the gestural brushstroke. Veils of color are dissolved with solvent, causing layers underneath to push forward. Fluid marks are often contained within a shape or stopped by a sharp edge in contrast to the quick gesture, revealing both transitory and measured time. 

Nina Rizzo’s paintings are equal part fact and fiction. Using direct experience with a place, event or object as a catalyst, Rizzo abstracts, invents and explores new possibilities. Paint exists, in these images, so that its physicality becomes part of the image: flat areas and surface build-up battle hints of illusion as these combinations attempt to maintain existence as coherent occurrences. References to structures and natural elements create tension where surface competes with depth, and image competes with abstraction. Exaggerated color, fluid brush strokes, and spatial ambiguities reveal sensual environments where interiors and exteriors collide with figurative forms and our notion of reality is questioned.

The paintings in Hydroponics utilize plants; trees, leaves, flowers, studied both indoors and outdoors, as jumping off points for explorations of color, paint layering, shape, light, and movement. Nina Rizzo spent the year 2020 walking in the park, tending to house plants, and working in watercolor. These paintings are a direct result of that time.