The Knapp Gallery continues its tradition of First Friday openings and welcomes back Adam Farrell, in his latest body of paintings As Above, So Below. Farrell, a veteran Knapp Gallery painter, is known for serving up complex, controversial and cryptic faire. He picks at pressure points, the spots of irritation that are difficult to scratch. Recognizable imagery disarms and lures us into awaiting snares of complicity.
With a proclivity for the comedic, Adam's sarcasm can be unsettling. Often politically based and socially charged, Farrell's images demand of us alternative levels of collective responsibility. Farrell is extremely present to real time, requiring of us a commensurate measure of awareness. He does not tolerate slackers and requires our undivided participation. A pervasive sense of the hilarious, the ridiculous even, Adam is to be taken seriously. Despite a continued and reinforced ideal of anonymity, Adam's situational plotting point the bony finger at the randomness of folly, fury and futility. Adam is not loud but crafty in ensnaring his victims, only the ignorant escape.
Adam's distinct and purposeful choice of caricatures, his iconography, keeps us on guard and off balance; a bizarre and unnerving menagerie. Forced viability, the employing of repetition as a tool to anneal his forgings, enforces his sculptural sensibilities. Though a painter, structural dogma raises the stakes to 3d. An illusionist by nature, Adam‘s keen sense of suggestion sets up his pointed though remarkably sophisticated prestige.
All of this aside, Adam is first a painter. His visual message is gleaned always though the application of paint. OCD in his delivery, Adam's imagery selection must withstand the rigors of his brush and stroke. Perspective and light quality reinforce and validate his tenure as a journeyman. If there were such an organization, Adam would be a card carrying lifetime member of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Painter's Coalition for the advancement of Oil Painters. He is serious about his craft. This is most refreshing.