Artist Christian Faur understands not only the adult attraction to the ideals of crayons, but has amped them up to create incredible, hand-crafted, crayon-pixellated, eye-defying images that are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Straddling a crossing between sculpture and painting, wax and print, he assembles more than 100,000 hand-cast crayons of his own shades and hues into staggeringly beautiful works of art. Impressionistic, with a hint of trompe l’oeil, the tiny crayon columns of separate colour simultaneously appease the eye and defy it. This is crayon-Pointillism, taking the agonizingly detailed pin pricks of colour pain-stakingly arranged on the canvas, a la George Seurat, and leaving the brain to do the other half of the work. It’s beauty is partially already realized by the patterns of colour, but then our eye struggles to put the rest together. It’s jarring and gorgeous, creating an almost physical sensation as our mind tries to adjust these point of colour into one big comprehensive picture. The experience of trying to see it is just as important as finally seeing.
