christian faur [art]

i was never any good at coloring. looking at christian faur's crayon pictures, maybe he wasn't either. while my old slaphappy method of splaying smiley faces on poorly proportioned two-dimensional dogs and people was garish and abstract in all its refrigerator magnet glory, like so many others my enthusiasm for the crayon ended on those sheaves of coarse brown paper. apparently, faur was bent on getting more out of his crayons. as such, his idea of retaining aesthetic while ditching traditional utility makes the crayon into a whole 'nother tool. in the pieces in faur's crayon series, the tips and slender columns of the crayons become 3D pixels, and the contours of the images change depth, shape, definition, and perception as the viewer changes vantage points. feels to me like these snapshots of life are meant to look familiar, and yet not quite. i find a lot of associative memory in the images: looking at someone through a screen, an old newspaper photo blown up out of scale, an infrared image, what life looks like with my glasses off, the millisecond after you look directly into a camera flash, a not yet developed polaroid. see what you want, the looking seems to be the important part.