Reviews 

A Curatorial Review

Jack Farkas is an artist who has spent more than six decades in sustained, serious engagement with a single fundamental question: what can color do that language cannot? His answer, refined through decades of teaching, curating, exhibiting, and making, is both formally and philosophically ambitious — and the body of work gathered at Estate Fine Art in Seymour, Connecticut constitutes a remarkable record of that lifelong inquiry.

Farkas's training has been as wide-ranging as it has been deep. He mastered painting, printmaking, lithography, woodcuts, serigraphy, design, typography, and pottery, but it was color — its aura, energy, and symbolic resonance — that became his signature. That breadth of technical formation is visible across the collection, which spans serigraphs from the early 1970s, oil paintings, and the large-scale oil pastel works that constitute his most recent and most fully realized practice. The medium changes; the preoccupation does not. Across six decades, Farkas has been asking the same question in different materials.

The contemporary oil pastel series, executed on heavy 140# cotton paper at scales that command physical presence in a room, is where that question finds its most concentrated and powerful expression. The works deploy a vocabulary of concentric squares and circles, arranged in grids, that is immediately recognizable as belonging to the tradition of geometric abstraction — but Farkas routes this formal language through an entirely personal cosmological framework that transforms it into something distinctly his own. Each work carries a date as its title rather than a descriptive name: 12.22.25, 11.11.25, 05.07.25. These are not filing conventions but statements of meaning. He describes his artwork as speaking "the language of color, emotions, feelings, auras, energies, spirituality, and flowers," and each composition channels the convergence of spiritual energies surrounding pivotal people and events, carrying subtle numerological significance and reflecting a meditation on the resonance between personal and collective experience through color's sacred symbolism.

The formal intelligence behind these works is considerable. Oil pastel, pressed with force into heavy cotton fiber, achieves a surface density that approaches the quality of oil paint — rich, luminous, and deeply saturated — while retaining the directness and immediacy of drawing. The concentric forms allow Farkas to explore color relationships across multiple registers simultaneously: within each ring, between adjacent rings, between one square or circle and its neighbors in the grid. The result is a kind of color polyphony — multiple harmonic relationships operating in parallel, each modifying the perception of the others. This is not coincidental. His lifelong exploration of symbolism led to the creation of a Dictionary on the Language and Meaning of Flowers, bridging visual art with poetry and cultural history— and the same impulse to systematize the expressive potential of visual elements underlies the chromatic rigor of the paintings. Color here is never arbitrary.

The earlier serigraphs in the collection — flowers, botanical forms, symbolic figures from the early 1970s — reveal the roots of this project in figurative and printmaking traditions. Works like In the Garden, Pet II, and Nobility of Martyrdom demonstrate the same underlying sensitivity to color as symbolic carrier, applied to organic subject matter through the flat, cleanly delineated fields that the serigraphy medium demands. There is a directness and confidence in these early prints that speaks of a painter who had already, in his thirties, found his essential visual language. The move from botanical symbol to pure geometric abstraction over the subsequent decades represents not a rupture but a deepening — an extraction of the essential from the incidental, the reduction of color and form to their irreducible symbolic charge.

As a professor and later dean at institutions across Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, Farkas shaped generations of artists. He curated exhibitions that brought figures such as John Taylor Arms, Josef Albers, Robert Motherwell, and Willem de Kooning to new audiences. The names are significant: Albers in particular, whose Homage to the Square series spent decades investigating how identical geometric forms change appearance through color variation, is an evident point of contact with Farkas's own practice. But where Albers pursued a rigorous phenomenology of color perception — empirical, cool, systematic — Farkas pursues something warmer and more spiritually inflected, rooted in symbol, calendar, and the belief that color carries meaning beyond its optical properties. His work has been praised by critics for its kinship to Matisse but with "color all his own."

Farkas describes his art as an invitation: symbols, shapes, and colors arranged to engage both eye and mind, encouraging viewers to let simple forms open pathways into memory, emotion, and self-reflection. "Each viewer is invited to take these images and let them flow into their own inner self," he explains. This is not a passive relationship but an active one — the painting not as finished object but as threshold, an encounter that begins at the surface and proceeds inward at the viewer's own pace and in the viewer's own direction. That aspiration is ambitious and, in the best of these works, genuinely achieved. The concentric forms draw the eye inward, the saturated colors create a physical warmth in the space around them, and the symbolic weight of the dates and seasons gives each painting a specificity of occasion that prevents the geometry from becoming merely decorative.

His work has been widely shown, with sixteen solo exhibitions and more than eighty group shows, including the Silvermine Art of the Northeast, the Museum of Modern European Art in Barcelona, and the Venice Biennale of Architecture and Art. For collectors, the work offers the unusual combination of formal sophistication, genuine conceptual depth, and the warmth of color that has been in sustained, serious relationship with its own expressive potential for more than half a century.

Despina Tunberg Curator

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