Fredman’s Simplicity Wins Out

F or more than 20 years, Faiya Fredman has quietly ob served the world, marked the tides, noted the remnants of past lives, both animal and architectural. A selection of her work from 1968 through 1989, now on view at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery, reveals a steady reverence for what is left--after the waves recede, the volcano strikes or the wrecking ball falls.

Fredman, who has lived near the beachfronts of Del Mar and La Jolla for most of the past two decades, has, during that time, shifted from a quiet, earthbound art to a more exuberant formalism and back again--to a sensual, impressionistic form of observation. The most affecting of her works are the simplest, those in which she trusts her instinctual response to nature.

In “Tideline, September 7, 1977,” one of a series, Fredman’s conscious control recedes as she welcomes the tide to compose its own image on a wide band of canvas coated with adhesive. Placed flat on the shore, the canvas receives the waves as invited guests, each one leaving behind a sandy trace of its path.

With the canvas mounted on the wall, the contours of the tidelines begin to resemble those of a rugged landscape, and Fredman’s act becomes one of empowering the Earth to create its own image. Rather than imposing her will on a compliant landscape, as did many of the bulldozing “Earthworks” artists of the 1970s, Fredman keeps to a relatively intimate scale and a tone of absolute respect for nature’s own forms. Poetic and powerful, the “Tideline” series comes early in the artist’s retrospective but is the show’s inspirational peak.

A loose-leaf book, “Tideline Photo Xerox,” also from 1977, adopts a similar, diaristic format. Each dated page documents a fragment of the tideline in a small, black-and-white photograph and a Xerox image of the photograph. The photographs are at a remove from the physical, evidential quality of the “Tideline” canvases, and the Xerox images are even further removed from the gritty tangibility of the sand paintings, for they translate tidal rhythms into pure pattern and contrast. While not a work of much magnitude, the visual journal does illuminate Fredman’s interest in the confluences and contrasts between direct observation, photographic recording and formal abstraction.

Photography plays a central role in Fredman’s work from the late ‘70s to the late ‘80s, and it is a natural choice, for the medium excels at grasping and retaining the ephemeral moment, after which neither subject nor observer remains the same. Fredman’s subjects are, themselves, traces of formerly vital sites and creatures. In several works from 1981 to 1983, single, iconic images of beached fish and skeletal fragments float mirage-like upon sand-washed, tideline-imprinted canvases.

In subsequent bodies of work, Fredman’s photographs shift from a presence of subtle suggestion to one of declarative fact. In the “House Fragment” series, the artist adheres a sepia-toned print of a home in the course of demolition to a canvas and paints selectively over both. More ambitious in scale and materials, but no less emotionally spare, the “Akroteri” series frames mammoth photographs of archeological ruins with scraps of wire netting and sifting troughs. Various denotational marks such as lines, arrows and Xs are painted onto the photographs, overlaying the images’ warm tones and softened contours with the cool efficiency of a scientific diagram. Three-dimensional, wood versions of the marks stand on the gallery floor as companions to the wall-mounted works.

With each layer of randomly applied paint and decorative embellishment, however, Fredman effectively buries the emotional power these sites hold over her. Her fascination with the remnant, the ruin-- what is left --is stifled by these overworked efforts at formal dynamism. This self-consciousness intrudes earlier, as well, when Fredman overlays several tideline canvases with translucent geometric forms. Though the dialogue initiated here between the organic, irregular tideline and the artificial, absolute, prescribed geometric forms sustains some interest, the tidelines by themselves are far more engaging.

An extreme example of Fredman’s forced formalism is the work from the “K” series, a huge assemblage in sand, oil, acrylic, paper, canvas and steel from 1988. Fragments of pipes and construction materials hover together in meaningless union, bound by an invisible, centripetal force. In the context of Fredman’s earlier, more delicate and sensitive work, the piece from this series appears especially hollow and contrived.

The artist’s most recent work seems to acknowledge the exhaustion of that last path, for it returns to a primal simplicity reminiscent of the tideline work. She loosens her attachment to the seen and ventures boldly into the realm of the felt. The document gives way to the impression, and a palette formerly bound to the earthy tones of gray and brown revels in rich, juicy color.

“Buddali,” the most rapturous of the recent works, pairs a black Conte crayon drawing with a lush oil painting in a single black frame. The drawing gives a sketchy account of an opening in a stone wall leading to a small enclosure. The painting beside it reads as a purely sensory response to the site, for it is a blistering hot field of brush strokes, fiery red in the center and cooling off slightly toward the edges.

Fredman’s drawings, when framed alone, lack the intensity of the combined works, though they do show a refreshing looseness in style. “Buddali,” however, and “Dorgoso” again reinforce Fredman’s interest in the layers of simultaneous experience--here, by pairing the visual impression with the gut response.

Though at times Fredman’s show feels painfully abbreviated, with certain series represented by only a single work, its comprehensive quality allows the artist’s focus to unfold under a broad variety of guises. Throughout, Fredman is a preserver, saving, recording and interpreting the discrete remains of an earlier moment or era. A small shelf of local fossils in one of the galleries suggests that her mission sometimes picks up where nature itself leaves off.

The show, accompanied by a catalogue, continues through May 2.