In 1930 a typeset book was published in Bruxelles in an edition of 850. This

volume titled Le Faux Van Gogh detailed known ‘fake’ Van Gogh’s of the time.

Dimensions and descriptions are supported by a mass of black and white plates

juxtaposing images of these ‘fakes’ with their ‘original’ counterparts.

Years ago while in Antwerp I splurged on a copy of my own having encountered it

floors up in an old book shop locked behind the loose tracked sliding glass of a

vitrine. There it was, central, aged olive green with aubergine cover text, winged by

a very old copy of Vico’s Scienza Nuova (The New Science) and a well-loved title

on vanitas of the Dutch baroque. Thumbing through the mold speckled pages of Le

Faux Van Gogh, I can’t help but giggle at the notion of indexing falsity.

Van Gogh was not only copied but he copied. Some unusual examples are his three

canvases in oil depicting enlarged compositions of Eisen and Hiroshige ukiyo-e

wood blocks from the floating world in Edo Japan.

In his famed series, the sunflowers of Arles, he copied compositions of his own. A

pair was painted in 1888 to hang above Gaugin’s bed during his stay in the yellow

house. Of the seven in this series, two are initial studies. The remaining five consist

of only two compositions. Today you can see Van Gogh’s ‘original’ painting

Sunflowers hanging in London’s National Gallery, or you can go see Sunflowers in

Amsterdam’s Van Gogh museum or should you be in Tokyo you can find Van

Gogh‘s ‘original’ painting Sunflowers at the Sompo Museum of Art.

The latter is frequently cited as faux though I don’t think it much matters. Sompo

Japan Insurance Inc. purchased it from Christie’s London in 1987 for just shy of 40

million dollars and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam currently lists Sompo

Japan Insurance inc. as a founding partner for its recent patronage in the realization

of a new entrance hall.

All of these Sunflowers are done in an early synthetic pigment, known as chrome

yellow which has a tendency to darken with exposure to light. Fascinatingly, when

you stand in front of Van Gogh’s ‘original’ painting Sunflowers in London,

Amsterdam or Tokyo you witness a dignified shade I would liken to French Ochre

not the hot and hectic synthetic chrome yellow as it was freshly painted in La Belle

Époque.

This evanescence of the synthetic is of perineal interest when reviewing artwork

that blossomed in the eras of Impressionism - Post and really, ever since. Given

time our relationship to the synthetic has only deepened and now that the cork is

popped, synthesis flows whether one thirsts for it or not.

This phenomenon is familiar today in the sun bleaching of plastic bags, aging of

paints, the micro plastics in your liver and a mounting confidence that the world is

no longer encountered, discovered or unwrapped but hurriedly invented.

Advancements are made and time trundles on.

Atop a small mountain in Southern California, on view at The Getty Center in Los

Angeles is Ultra-violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s Irises. This exposé of one

‘original’ painting and a copy of it inspired by its ‘original’ appearance

investigates Van Gogh’s use of the fugitive pigment geranium lake.

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) images show the blooms, close up, in nearly inverted

color like a limber deer through the night vision crosshairs of a squinted site.

Given a century + to bathe in the sun, an effervescent lake of geranium evaporates

and the blossoms once violet are now blue. Shortly after my visit last December,

the internal threat that material composition holds to immutability was rivaled by

the near Pompeiian instability of the external.

I am told that Painting is a plastic art, which is characterized by the practice of

applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid matrix.

Painted representations frequently outlive their subjects. The hardened oil eternally

in bloom. These warped phantoms mirroring what once was, a copy of something,

sometime, somewhere.

It would seem that if vanitas was for the living and Edo was floating, surely, we

are painted.

Samuel Farrier (b. 1989), is a New York based artist and founder of The

New York Board of Taste, a contextual archive in lower Manhattan specializing in

unlikely collaborations and small publishing.Farrier has been an artist in residence at The Elizabeth Foundation, NewYork (2017). Las Huertas, Cortez, CO (2019) and L’apartmento, Naples Italy(2022). Select group shows include: (Maria VMier) No: tongue breaks and thin

fire is racing under skin, Museum Brandhorst, Munich Germany 2024. The Flower

Thief, The Meeting, New York, 2024. Fixture, Soloway, Brooklyn, 2023. Mura

Bellini, Taschino, Naples Italy, 2022. Rubus Armeniacus, Jessica's Place, New

York, 2019. Superhuman, Fisher Parish, New York, 2018. Hectare, Demain, Paris,

France, 2018. 36 hours, Particulier, New York, 2017.