The urgent need to think about the meaning and management of change is underscored in Death of Bicycles with Brain Tissue where we encounter a brain amid an enormous stack of frames, seats, rims and tires from the once ubiquitous riding machines. The lighted brain, partially obscured, falls along a belt across the middle of the painting consisting of a red and green heart, a bicycle seat, a bike light and a smaller almost invisible heart on the far right. The overall presentation has aspects similar to a shrine, in this case, dedicated a passing moment in the haste of change, and to the need to rethink -and maybe memorialize--what it means in the life of people.
 Several works of the recent years show McFarlane introducing new symbols into his work, and simultaneously moving toward greater emphasis on abstract elements in his art.  In Inside the Heart of Apple, for example, the apples become a major visual presence though accompanied by other fresh symbols including lips and hearts. A heart may also be noted in the previously cited Bicycle with Brain Tissue and Pyramid with Black and White Brains, as well as in Internal Anatomy II. Lips--specifically a woman’s painted lips-- figure importantly not just in Heart of the Apple, but also several untitled recent paintings. Clearly sexual symbols have emerged in recent pictures such as the aforementioned Miscarriage and Rebirth with is overwhelming vulva and Environment without Traction where a smaller vulva may be found.
 A tendency towards preoccupation with formal or abstract elements is evident in the previously cited Environment without Traction and other new works in which McFarlane has clearly given great attention to the pictorial surface. In Traction where a number of familiar motifs such as pyramids appear along with new ones, McFarlane has worked and reworked the surface, introducing scratching, scoring and other vigorous modes of marking. He has over-painted portions with the palette knife using color freed of representational obligations. As a result, our response to the painting is significantly influenced by textures behind the images. Fields of color unrelated to representational references reinforce the drift toward abstraction. Similarly, attention to the abstract possibilities of marking, scraping and scratching of the picture surface is also strongly evident in Mixed Feelings--Toward Traction where the imagery is less intriguing than the information that seems to be buried in the surface of the painting. Indeed, the intense light radiating from that surface renders the imagery almost translucent, heightening the abstract drama contained along its background.

 Bryan McFarlane, using a combination of visual strategies accompanied by an evolving iconography that combines personal and collective symbols into a fresh system of meaning, is a contemporary artist of note. His work is grounded in his formative experience as a post-colonial Jamaican artist, but it is informed and broadened by his rapacious consumption of ideas ranging from folk wisdom to critical theory, and by his travel and exposure to different cultural, intellectual, economic and political environments. As he has digested his expanding experiences, he has reflected them in his art, giving it a cosmopolitan, international quality. His own sensibilities and talents, combined with hard work, have allowed him to bring both power and clarity to his work earning for him a place of merit in the international order of visual artists.

Edmund Barry Gaither
Director of The Museum of The National Center Of African Artists, Boston.
Adjunct Curator: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

(文：Edmund Barry Gaither/摄影：/责任编辑：baishitou)

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