Excerpt from review: “A brilliant mix of reds, oranges and pinks, the fiery mane of the woman in “Red” provides the only keys to the personality of a visage otherwise closed off from empathy: through her slitted eyes, the model seems to look just past or right through us. Conversely, the subject of “Camo” stares confrontationally at the viewer. Pfarr’s careful distortions that break the lit and unlit portions of the model’s face into two distinctly different portraits has a disruptive effect which, coupled with the broad paint application, results in an image that is simultaneously compelling and disturbing. For an artist working in the realm of portraiture, there is always a dance between replicating surface and representing essence. Pfarr’s affecting work takes this a step further, probing the iconography of style-making and conventions of beauty to wonder how to confront and overcome the anxiety of a culture increasingly attuned to fashionable ideals.”
Excerpt from review: “At first, the painting Curio looks abstract, with a field of flat color, a few drips of oil paint and a rapid succession of gestures. But a portrait emerges from an unlikely, nontraditional position on the canvas. Nearly running off the frame at the upper left is a face with shaded eyes, polished ruby lips and blushed cheeks. Frenzied brushstrokes build the model’s body -- marks that seem to be both constructing and unraveling the figure.”
Excerpt from review: “The barrage of images can be daunting. From supermarket checkout lines to billboards, marketers’ messages about beauty and ideal femininity are everywhere. Even if you never leave your house, you can’t escape them, as they arrive daily in the form of catalogs and advertisements via the mailbox and computer screen. Throughout her career, Princeton, New Jersey-based painter Theresa Pfarr has tackled these everyday, unrealistic images of women head-on through her large-scale oil paintings. She studies and researches depictions of women in advertising (particularly the fashion industry) and then deconstructs -- and reinvents -- the imagery in her work. “The images come at you, and to me it felt natural to make something in answer to them,” Pfarr said. “It’s therapeutic but also frustrating. I’ll think, ‘Well, maybe I should just ignore them. But you can’t, really.’ ” Instead, she paints them.”
Excerpt from review: “Pfarr has a way with her brush, sometimes with thickly driven strokes, others with smooth, fading color transitions, always in the juxtaposition to reveal her emotive intention. Sugar Lips and Oh Chloe xoxo are heavily abstracted, colors expressively seemed to be almost splattered on the canvas at times, but the resulting pieces both calculatingly, compositionally complete. In Must Haves and the untitled (Gray head), the artist is more explicit with her intention. Both show stand-outs at their elongated canvas size; the two show almost the entire figure, stopping at the calves. Standing in environments, they seem to tell stories beyond their skinny frames and hard stares.”
Sally Deskins, "Les Femmes Folles", April 4, 2012 interview
Excerpt from interview:
SD: Tell me about this show at MAM and why its important to you.
TP: The show at Modern Arts Midtown comprises a new phase of my work which I feel I’ve been moving into for the past two years. The pervasiveness of the iconic female image, and standards of beauty and innocence have long been driving my work and began with my wanting to throw off that standard and subvert it. The current phase involves beginning to explore a more autobiographical and at the same time more critical (though maybe self-critical) point of view which addresses how I am influenced, lured and do participate in cycles of consumerism and have the desire to be beautiful.
SD: Does feminism play a role in your work?
TP: Ostensibly, making figurative paintings of women as a female is a feminist act.”
Excerpt from press release: “Pfarr’s genre of choice is of course a portrait, but while it possesses the classical conventions of composition and pose, the lighting, costume, draping and body language suggest something less than a runway and more of a police lineup. These portraits vary from the fragile and cruel to the survivors of a night of wretched excess. In cinematic terms, despite their formality, these poseurs wear their feelings on exposed limbs and in melting makeup much like the ladies of the evening at King’s Cross in Neil Jordan’s fantastical “Mona Lisa.” There is still a hint of beauty and allure in their figures but the eyes tell a different story. Pfarr’s models resemble a bouquet of flowers just past full bloom, at the edge of wilt or way past, desperate to attract, some more aware than others of their diminished self-identity and mirror image. Others know it’s too late to blossom again, but it’s all they have left. There is courage here and a great deal of grace in these young women who vary from Model Runway contestants to the next Desperate Housewife.”
Libby Rosof, "Theresa Pfarr's Troubled Fashionistas at Carbon14", the artblog, August 23, 2011
Excerpt from review: “Pfarr’s paintings are of dissolving young women who look a lot like the artist…but not quite. The works talk about fashion and bodies and unattainable ideals–the confusion of not fitting, not meeting the cultural prescriptions, and the horror of what those prescriptions are. The scale of these works is an overpowering 72 inches tall, to a modest 12 inches square. Yet the small ones have as much impact as the large ones!”
Kevin Krumnikl, "Ten Words and One Shot", Vol. 1, July 16, 2010
Leigh Anne Couch, Roswell A-I-R Exhibition catalog essay, July 2006
“In Lady Lazarus Sylvia Plath asks us, “Do I terrify: - The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth ?” Theresa Pfarr’s women and children -shy, disdainful bone-tired, contorted, and defiantly vulnerable-gaze directly at us with the same imperative: Do I terrify? Is this what you wanted? This exaggerated swagger and hip-cock, these shoulders like knives, my neck thrown back like this, my wrists bound by invisible lines?
The first impression given by these figures is that they are fashion plates, a body in pieces, a dressed window, but look closely. It is hard to do this, to withstand the judgement in these postures and faces painted for the stage, the marketplace, war. Every viewer becomes their maker because these figures are the product of our desire. They peer from gorgeous static-color fields both intuitive and precise- and are arrested at just that moment before they return to nothingness, their natural state. For these are no longer women and they know it: they are impossibilities and they all look like they’re in danger. Their sorrow is ethereal and in the end more beautiful than their surfaces of longing.
‘What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want….
If only you knew how the veils were killing my days.’
- From “A Birthday Present”, Sylvia Plath“