Review & Press

“BRYAN McFARLANE: CAUGHT IN COLORFUL RAIN This Boston artist draws on memories of tropical rains in his native Jamaica for some of these paintings, which seem to catch and refract sunlight in their downrush of color. Others, with horizontal striations, suggest blurred, misty landscapes or dark riverbeds. All are inquisitions into facets of painting: surface and undercoat, the grid, color, and tactility. Through March 27. Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury St., 617-267-9060, www.gallerynaga.com“

“Decoding the clouds
Bryan McFarlane’s “Lucky Cloud” at Gallery NAGA.
Bryan McFarlane’s exuberant, expressionist paintings at Gallery NAGA straddle landscape and abstraction. In “Catfish in the Sky,” a carnival of clouds whirls against a sodden sky over a peachy rose beach. Most of the clouds are giant, juicy squibs of paint. A cobalt blue shape like a swaddled babe floats along the surface, and the curve of a glinting fish flails right behind its head. The show, titled “Stories in the Clouds” fixates on these lively, colorful fluffs. “Lucky Cloud” sets two knots of them against horizontal bands of soft, gray tones, some running with drips and streaked with color. The two clouds — one hangs off the right edge, the other we see in full — are lumpy, assertive, and chatty. McFarlane and his wife recently had a baby, and it’s hard not to see something fetal in these forms — generative, wild with potential, a symbol of life.”

“From September 4th – 29th, Gallery Naga will feature recent paintings by Boston-based artist Bryan McFarlane in an exhibition titled, My Dragon’s Silk Road. Though new to McFarlane’s work, I am incredibly intrigued by his artistic, cultural and critical interests, not to mention his striking oil on linen compositions.
In his paintings I see bold, layered and unusual color juxtapositions. I see hearts, rainbows, dice, pyramids, wishbones, eggs, G-clefs and jesters. I see stream of conscious symbols dancing towards abstraction on fields of liquid-looking hues. And I see an artist brimming with ideas and connections that seem as though they could spill right off the stretcher. 
The paintings that comprise My Dragon’s Silk Road are selections from the past two years, a period in which McFarlane explored a deep fascination with China and its expanding role in the contemporary art world. McFarlane melds that curiosity with influences from his native Jamaica and formative travels to Brazil, Columbia, West Africa and East Asia, allowing these intermixed experiences and resulting lines of inquiry to shape a pivotal moment in his own painting practice….”

“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 avant-garde 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 20^th 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 has served him well.”

“Bryan McFarlane is clearly a cohort in this 21st century abstraction. His canvases populated with mysterious amebic disks and, fanned arcs, and elusive shapes that in some stances coalesce into references to bicycle part (wheels, handle bars, seats) or eggs. We can also find tables, ladders, floral flourishes, carts, race card and even lighting fixture. These all exist and even float in variable space where no Newtonian laws function. These spaces are vast, opaque and [liquid] and find their counterpart particularly in Terry Winter’s ‘multidirectional thought’ where ‘patterns…complicate legibility where figural readings, are implicated’. This allows McFarlane to seamlessly traverse the worlds of abstraction and figuration and to convey the ‘multidirectional’ aspects of his personal and cultural references within this mode of abstraction.”
“McFarlane’s iconography is clearly more optimistic. That is to be expected from an artist who identifies with the expanding art world that is emerging in the context of the 21^st cultural and economic developments world-wide. As Edmund Barry Gaither observes, ‘[McFarlane’s] work is interested in issues without being determined by issues. It seeks to simultaneously examine critical socio-political questions…while evolving a formal vocabulary and a suite of aesthetic considerations that together constitute a powerfully expressive visual language’.”