Over his quite remarkable career, Bryan McFarlane has developed a forceful visual language characterized by a highly individual iconography composed from elements in his own ‘postcolonial Jamaican background’, and enriched by his engagement with other  cultural traditions through travel. To sum up McFarlane’s visual language in one phase, I would offer that “history and escape” provide the dominant themes, each being expressed differently as McFarlane has grown as an artist through his international travels.
 Part of the first generation of Jamaican artists born after independence, McFarlane’s work is rooted in the postcolonial struggle to find appropriate visual expression for both the “history” black cultural roots and his ambition to “escape” by contributing to the international contemporary art scene. His desire to better understand his Jamaican heritage and his global aspirations led him to travel widely, and to join in the discourse that has animated the global post-colonial world. Critical ideas ranging from hybridity, creolization, modernity, deconstruction to conceptualism have engaged him. He has explored contemporary and avantgarde cultural theories and has considered the ideas of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Jacques Derrida. Contemporary critical discussion is an intellectual landscape that he has made home. Feeling a strong bond with people of the “Third World” and people of color, McFarlane, like many Jamaicans and Africans of the late 20th century, understands the ways that the colonial experience distorts personalities, inflicts psychological pain and leaves lasting economic scars, yet he resolved to claim a place on the world’s stage through his creative genius as a visual artist. His tools were a rich appreciation of his own subjectivity, an openness to the world beyond himself, acceptance of the jeopardy of exercising his existential freedom to be creative, and a commitment to master the discipline of art-making. His kit of intellectual and practical tools have served him well.
 After studying at the Jamaica School of Art and the Massachusetts College of Art, McFarlane continued learning through further study and travel in Africa, Europe, South America and Asia. He also became a university teacher. As his career progressed, he strove to share what he was learning with his students in the United States, as well as with students and institutions back in his native country. He found himself not just seeking fellowships for his own purposes, but also to support ways in which he could broaden and enrich the learning experiences of young artists that he touched through teaching, and through relationships across national and cultural boundaries. A sense of mission toward his students and his native Jamaica became inseparable from his personal ambitions for recognition as a contemporary artist.
 Though initially a figurative painter whose work was influenced by Expressionism, he has evolved an approach that is substantially abstract and infused with a deep sense of mystery. In this current exhibition where a considerable span of his career is presented, all of these aspects of his style and content are evident.
 At the outset of his career, McFarlane was a figurative artist. Although his art is now largely inclined toward abstraction, he has never abandoned figuration. In The Wedding, for example, he reinvents a long-ago family event deriving his images from an old photograph that he converts into digitalized forms. From a figurative starting point, he used tiny blocks of muted color to dematerialize the figures converting them ultimately into a totally abstract field of colored squares or pixels. Of course, you could also view the series of six panels stacked in columns of two in reverse, that is, as the progressive revelation of the marriage scene from ‘pixelized’ abstraction to representational clarity. In either case, this remarkable multi-panel work is visually fascinating. It is probable that the approach explored in The Wedding owes inspiration in some measure to the watercolorist Richard Yarde, who also breaks his forms into small fields of colors often akin to pixels. In a more recent painting--Sorting out Perceptions I, II and III, McFarlane has returned to figurative elements--including a self-portrait--integrated with other icons and motifs widely used in his abstract art.
 McFarlane came from a quite particular Jamaican background, one that sprang from the heavy African presence--a legacy of transatlantic slavery-- in the largest and most populous English-speaking island of the Caribbean. He grew up in a Maroon community with ancestral ties to the Akan cultural groups of Ghana in West Africa. Later he spent time in Ghana where he produced a body of work evoking lingering strands of his heritage, strands that he has sometimes forgot or under-appreciated. In the old slave forts along the Ghanaian coast, he saw stacks of cannon balls that had once given the Europeans the power to dominate black majorities in the Americas and to exploit the African coast and interior.(文：Edmund Barry Gaither/摄影：/责任编辑：baishitou)

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