Sunburn at Circle Beach Detail (Sweat, Hat, Sunscreen)

Working in acrylic and mixed media on canvas, as well as graphite and ink on paper, Leyla Faye’s art often refers to her ethnic background (with a “hyphenated identity”) and upbringing. Her large canvases, sometimes incorporating three-dimensional extensions (thus linking them to an American Pop art tradition where Robert Rauschenberg’s [1925 – 2008] celebrated Combines, works that combine aspects of painting and sculpture, is close at hand as a comparison), made a huge impact at the Frieze New York Art Fair in 2024. Reviewing the fair (in ‘Frieze Fun! All over Chelsea!’, article in Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 7 May 2024) Jan Garden Castro writes:

Curiously, there were many works by women focusing on universal women’s issues. In addition, work was selling out. On preview Day One at Frieze, Leyla Faye’s large mixed media doppelgangers or double identities of herself at Company Gallery were sold out. Each work shows one or two women in rooms in a doll house. The identities are not fixed and suggest her white and black heritage. The compositions are mixed media and feature odd poses in small spaces.

Faye’s successful participation at Frieze was preceded by an, equally well received, solo exhibition (Trust Fall, 3 February – 11 March 2023) at Company Gallery, New York. Arianna Nourse (independent cultural producer, writer and curator) wrote the following in connection with the exhibition, where “doll-like, look-alike figures” were “rendered with an artisan’s delicacy”:

Throughout the exhibition’s canvases, the artist’s characters gaze down, out, up, sideways. A trust fall - the act of falling backwards blindly into another’s waiting arms - a leap of faith, a risk that another will catch us. Here, the risk taking is at a primary level self-contained […] As an artist at Yale and since, Faye’s work examined the anxieties at the centre of the Venn Diagram circles of Black and White. While using her likeness, she spoke allegorically about the collision of races within and without. […] Faye describes each individual figure as less self-portrait than separate doppelgänger, each holding her own experience. If we were to regress, and wonder, and peel off a layer, we’d find a body painted underneath, parts intact. No need for this though, for Faye has already stripped her dolls bare. Focus, anticipation, uncertainty, resignation: everything she feels, they feel. Everything they feel, through her nuanced realism, we feel, too. An emotional transmission from artist to viewer. This, too, an act of trust.

Faye’s work in Trust Fall depicted sporty and muscular acrobats, traversing trapeze and tightropes, with the solidity and solidarity of seasoned professionals. This theme was followed up in the exhibition Trema (Karma International in Zürich, 8 June – 14 September 2024) with works dedicated to the theme of circus (“Growing up, both of my parents were performers and still are to this day”, as Faye explained in an interview with Karolina Dankow).

“Doll-like, look-alike figures”, acrobats and circus performers, however, are conspicuously absent in Faye’s, graphite and ink on paper drawings, Sunburn at Circle Beach Detail (Sweat, Hat, Sunscreen) and Sunburn at Circle Beach Detail (Embrace). Here we, in the first of the two works, instead encounter a depiction of a (family?) scene on a beach. The slightly chaotic close-up has all the trademarks of a snapshot taken with the camera of a contemporary smartphone. It also suggests a slightly less successful attempt at taking a polaroid picture back in the 1970s or early 1980s. Is it all part of Faye’s imagination or is it, possibly, based on family holiday photos from her childhood/youth?

In the foreground, the sweaty figure, dressed in a patterned shirt, obscures an unidentified woman (?) in a sun hat who appears to be smearing the forehead of a third character (possibly a child or a teenager?) with sunscreen. In the upper right corner of the composition, we find a fourth individual who seems to be completely oblivious to what is going on, instead focusing on the pleasures of a day on the beach.

Perhaps the title of the works can offer further clues? Does “Circle Beach” refer to Circle Beach Connecticut, overlooking the Long Island Sound from an idyllic location, halfway between Guilford and Madison, less than a three-hour drive from Brooklyn (where the artist currently resides)? If so, does it relate to a recent visit by the artist or is it based on childhood memories?

These are questions that we, as viewers, probably never will find an answer to, and quite rightfully so: artists should never give away too much detailed information about their work. The fact that both compositions are referred to as “details” of Sunburn at Circle Beach, however, indicates that the drawings may be preparatory works for a larger painting (completed or not). Faced with these questions perhaps the best strategy is to leave them all unanswered and instead immerse ourselves in the contemplative pictorial qualities of the compositions that could be regarded as condensed and compressed versions of similar, albeit monumental, compositions in art history like Bathers at Asnières (Georges Seurat [1859 – 1891], 1884, oil on canvas, 201 x 301 cm, National Gallery, London).

Provenance
Company Gallery, New York.
Firestorm Foundation (acquired through the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation