Flood no. 10

With the paintings from the Flood series in particular, Furnas aggressively attacks the zips as indexes of Newman's legacy, trying to cover up and drown these linear partitions with the swelling motion of the more robust swaths of red. With Floods, Furnas seems to aspire to the sublime of a very different type than the Romantic representation of it or Newman's instatiation of it. Instead, Furnas's sublime asserts itself in that tension between what we see on the surface and what we know lied beyond it. It is the tension between a sense of calm and the destructive force of the flood, a tension between history (as constituted by the landscape) and the present, between the Red Sea of the Bible and the harrowing ordeal of New Orleans in 2005, between tranquility and the deluge of paint that seeks to destroy it (N. Abrams, "Barnaby Furnas and Barnett Newman, Barnaby Furnas Floods, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2009, p. 29).