I fell in love with Fabienne Verdier’s canvases yesterday, when I looked through the catalogue and saw some of her works still up at Art Plural Gallery. No explanation for this, no grand theory. It must have something to do with the fact that I’ve been on a steady diet of Max Richter, Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross (the ambient tracks from The Social Network), Brian Eno, Bang on a Can (doing Terry Riley’s In C) and others (the list is long)….and something about the way sound pulsates and how Fabienne calls some of the paintings in this series “energy fields”.
I learn very late, very slowly. I am on my own clock. I discovered Sonic Youth and Blonde Redhead first and then, following the family tree, have only recently discovered their progenitor, Glenn Branca. If you hear “The Ascension”, you just hear vast swathes of Sonic Youth-ness. Yesterday, Branca was on while I took a crowded bus at peak hour from the city to home. It had rained. I had nothing to do but stand intimately close to warm bodies in a trundling bus getting stuck in long lines of traffic. I thought about Verdier’s energy fields while listening to Branca’s pulsations and wailing and did this (below). Thank you Fabienne Verdier and Glenn Branca, for actually making me feel like the bus-ride was too short.
