Gabert Farrar: colors of quarter-things

half colors of quarter-things is a line from the Wallace Stevens poem “The Motive for Metaphor” – a poem about how language can never adequately describe experiences and how in order to describe events we must make metaphors, saying this experience was like something else….  and how the act of making metaphors, though creative, is a weakening, a step removed from the actual indescribable experience.

This failure to communicate is brought to the forefront in Farrar’s new series of large-scale, abstract paintings.  Using text as a point of departure – quotes from poetry and theoretical texts scattered about the artist’s studio – Farrar works in a process-oriented manner, with each subsequent step in the painting used to negate the previous one.  With the ultimate destruction of the text through abstraction, the paintings are unburdened by any attempt to “address” anything and exist on their own terms.  The physical nature of this work directly references his past work abstracting the desolate urban landscape.  However, these works grew out of a series of 23” square paintings of seemingly disparate images arranged stacked or in grids.  The artist states “The main motivation for these multi-panel installations comes largely from reading poems and examining how poetry communicates.  A line of poetry consists of words, each of which has their individual meaning.  When combined, these meanings form concepts or images which are further nuanced by sound and rhythm which can either reinforce or negate the meanings of the words or create new images altogether that are perceived simultaneously.  It is compelling how different images and concepts can exist simultaneously and interdependently in a single line or stanza; and, it is this presentation of connections that ultimately communicates something to the reader.  This series of paintings is an attempt to explore such a “presentation of connections.”