Barbara Friedman
Lost Places

These paintings might be described as responses to both the objects one comes upon and the space in which one discovers them.  I look into the spaces that hold objects and I paint the lost scenes that I come to, working physically through the paint as if fog enveloped these forgotten places and I had to scrape and clear a path to them.

On the other side of the fog I arrive at nearly emptied scenes, sparsely furnished and blurred to near-abstraction.  In a somewhat impressionistic attitude mediated by cinematic gestures, I leave elements of the paintings undefined.  The vagaries of one moment evoke another until the image finally settles into a glimpse of a world sliding past.

In a sense the spaces in these paintings are a cover: the pieces are as much about time as they are about place.  In fact they are a conversation I’m having with myself about the nature of time.  The paintings examine the vagueness of appearances and the need to keep renegotiating one’s bearings.  As distillations of passing moments they speak to an elevated sense of mortality but also to a feeling of being optically over-powered. 

It might be that when things are important enough to focus on, we remember them as isolated experiences.  That is how I understand the sentiment with which Proust signs off on the last page of Swann’s Way: “The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”  These paintings are disappearing acts, and what’s shown to be disappearing on the canvas – or from the canvas – are passing moments and lost places.