Gabert Farrar’s seven densely layered, labyrinthine paintings at Monique Meloche are inspired by his feelings about cities. “Anybody walking down the city street sees a jumble of cars and buildings and street lamps,” he says. “The spatial relationships in this jumble can become unclear, and you don’t know if you’re looking at backgrounds or foregrounds.” Jagged, brightly colored shapes are intended to approximate this confusion–augmented by barely legible text fragments that also encourage you to try to resolve the image.
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After a “pretty bucolic” childhood in Richmond, Kentucky, Farrar says, he was stunned to see his first big city, Toronto, at nine or ten. Two of the classes he took while at the University of Michigan also had a major influence on him. A course on art and architecture of the ancient Near East exposed him to the idea that the forms in art might express a culture’s ethos. He came to think of the geometrical designs produced by early urban civilizations, for instance, as “a way of exerting psychological control over inhuman elements like a river or a plant or an ox.” A drawing course taught him that art is “really about how you perceive and describe things–how does something sit on a table, how do two planes meet? It’s a way of understanding the world.”
Farrar takes his texts from things he’s read that have affected him. The most legible passage, “Repent the end of the world is upon us” in Repent…, comes from Alan Moore’s comic book Watchmen. The words, mostly in blue, turn red wherever tan lines cross them. In He Would Be…, thick green letters spell out “he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him”–a quote from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It’s half-obscured by geometrical designs and cloudy white blobs, which arguably contradict the text’s prediction. The line in This Is…, “This is My First Time Ever,” is Farrar’s paraphrase of a Buddhist text he read years ago about the newness of each being. “All living creatures live bewildered,” he says. Here it’s almost impossible to distinguish the words from the fragmentary other marks–and Farrar says he intended his prominent yellow brushstrokes to “cancel” the layers underneath and “scramble” how the work would be read.
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