The Search for Meaning in Madness

Driven by a need to seek out grounding forces amidst chaos and confusion, Caroline Faye begins each painting with a randomized surplus of visual information, ranging from intuition-driven mark-making to representational depictions of everyday objects. The process is iterative, and continues until the work reveals a resemblance to reality. Often, what emerges is mountains and oceans, which become the anchor of imaginary places reminiscent of the landscapes that defined her upbringing in Miami, Colorado, and Maine. Once these false worlds are discovered, Faye pushes the work further towards representation by creating a sense of space and integrating visual motifs common to the area.

In her faithful representation of fabricated landscapes, Faye blurs the line between the natural and the artificial, her use of hyper-saturated color highlighting the artifice inherent to human attempts to recreate natural world. Pastel blues, pinks, and yellows hark to childhood, grounding the artifice in innocence and imagination. While these landscapes are constructed rather than observed, their grounding in memory and sentiment keeps them tethered to the natural world, occupying the space between lived reality and the world that artists create for themselves and their audiences.