By Irma V. Arzola, Art Historian

Federico Farrington is an artist who playfully explores human interaction while manifesting a unique inner openness. “Entrelazados” is a playful exploration of the ambivalence perceptible in the human spectacle through the iconographic syncretism of sexualized, androgynous, zoomorphic bodies, distorted and fused in indeterminate spaces. The traces of the painting process, the history of its development, are evident on the surface of the substrate. These constitute a plastic deconstruction that serves as a testament to the development of Farrington's visual art.

From the moment I met Federico, over a decade ago, he was already creating enigmatic and provocative images with multifaceted interpretations that seem to emanate from a bestiary of chimeras. Farrington conveys dreamlike scenes that confront the viewer with the paradoxical nature of existence. "Interlaced" externalizes his meditations on social roles and the different personas each individual constructs and employs to relate to others. The undefined environments contain mythological figures and characters from the world of circus performance, whose physiognomies embody their psyches and who participate in narratives about violence, power, and love.

In this new series, Farrington works on altarpieces in a way that reveals the fluidity and experimental, intuitive, and historical nature of his process. The artist carefully considers each stroke, tone, and volume captured, studying its effect on the whole. He intervenes in the surface using oil brushstrokes and occasionally alters them with sandpaper and stencils transferred with spray paint, thereby deconstructing the painting technique and the intended result. The surfaces are rich and luminous, even when the palette is limited to a few colors and their grisailles. The polychromatic effect intensifies the sensation of penetrating and participating in a fantastical world that engenders curiosity and incites synesthetic experiences.

"Entrelazados" creates a space filled with stimuli and convergences that invite reflection, feeling, and close observation. The distorted, extended, and undefined interstices of form and concept make the viewer a participatory agent in the meaning revealed in each performance.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My creative process entails a narrative where diverse images and topics simultaneously converge, from the most mundane—the profoundly psychological, the ritualistic, the politically charged, the humorous, the erotic, and even the sublime. With the strokes and colors of my works, I explore the planes of a distorted reality that navigate between cartoonish innuendos and the transpersonal. Paradoxically, elements of unreal truth persist in this interpretation, where locality disappears into a timeless space and characters interact in a playful atmosphere with irreverent humor. The density and lightness of human existence are polarized, acting like a pendulum that swings between opposites or variants; ambiguity and its vulnerability are responses to the quantum world of multiple possibilities, to the ever-present uncertainty of knowing and, above all, to appreciating the beauty of mystery.

Federico Farrington