Caspar Fairhall
Caspar Fairhall’s eclectic art practice spans painting, works on paper, installation, video and interactivity. Making use of contradictions and paradoxes in visual illusion, Fairhall often looks at the tension between our intuitions of space and time, and what we understand about the world from science. Much of Fairhall’s work seems to question the act of representing space in an image, or how might a space in an image relate to the space and time outside the image, and the act of looking into and at an image.
At work in his studio, Fairhall’s methods are reminiscent of traditional Renaissance techniques, as his paintings emerge from intimate studies of form and shape in a process of layering precise detailed drawing. He uses the picture surface as a void from which images are withdrawn using complex, layered paint surfaces and unresolvable pictorial spaces as tools to explore the relationship between pictorial, optical and cosmic space.
Much of Fairhall’s work is derived from his time in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and draws on the ancient banded iron formations of the Hamersly Ranges, which date from the Archean epoch 2.5 billion years ago. Both the sense of deep time and the biological origin of these formations are central concerns of this body of work. More recently, following a four month residency in Basel, Switzerland, he has extend this body of work to examine the geology of the Swiss Alps and the effects of entropy on built structures.
Caspar Fairhall’s eclectic art practice spans painting, works on paper, installation, video and interactivity. Making use of contradictions and paradoxes in visual illusion, Fairhall often looks at the tension between our intuitions of space and time, and what we understand about the world from science. Much of Fairhall’s work seems to question the act of representing space in an image, or how might a space in an image relate to the space and time outside the image, and the act of looking into and at an image.
At work in his studio, Fairhall’s methods are reminiscent of traditional Renaissance techniques, as his paintings emerge from intimate studies of form and shape in a process of layering precise detailed drawing. He uses the picture surface as a void from which images are withdrawn using complex, layered paint surfaces and unresolvable pictorial spaces as tools to explore the relationship between pictorial, optical and cosmic space.
Much of Fairhall’s work is derived from his time in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and draws on the ancient banded iron formations of the Hamersly Ranges, which date from the Archean epoch 2.5 billion years ago. Both the sense of deep time and the biological origin of these formations are central concerns of this body of work. More recently, following a four month residency in Basel, Switzerland, he has extend this body of work to examine the geology of the Swiss Alps and the effects of entropy on built structures.
Caspar Fairhall’s eclectic art practice spans painting, works on paper, installation, video and interactivity. Making use of contradictions and paradoxes in visual illusion, Fairhall often looks at the tension between our intuitions of space and time, and what we understand about the world from science. Much of Fairhall’s work seems to question the act of representing space in an image, or how might a space in an image relate to the space and time outside the image, and the act of looking into and at an image.
At work in his studio, Fairhall’s methods are reminiscent of traditional Renaissance techniques, as his paintings emerge from intimate studies of form and shape in a process of layering precise detailed drawing. He uses the picture surface as a void from which images are withdrawn using complex, layered paint surfaces and unresolvable pictorial spaces as tools to explore the relationship between pictorial, optical and cosmic space.
Much of Fairhall’s work is derived from his time in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and draws on the ancient banded iron formations of the Hamersly Ranges, which date from the Archean epoch 2.5 billion years ago. Both the sense of deep time and the biological origin of these formations are central concerns of this body of work. More recently, following a four month residency in Basel, Switzerland, he has extend this body of work to examine the geology of the Swiss Alps and the effects of entropy on built structures.