The paintings in Neil Farber’s Slugging can be divided into a few camps. There are those featuring a multitude of indistinguishable individuals, those in which heavy black outlines and block shapes add up to childlike depictions of animals, and still others built from delicate ink lines and shapes repeated again and again into nine-legged alligators or tree-dwelling pachyderms. A founding member of the now-defunct Royal Art Lodge—a Winnipeg-based arts collective which included Marcel Dzama and Michael Dumontier—Farber’s first solo show at Edward Thorp Gallery shows developing technical abilities, but an unfortunate lack of focus.
Viewers familiar with the Lodge’s whimsical style and tongue-in-cheek sense of humor will be disappointed by Slugging, but the exhibition indicates Farber’s development as an artist. New techniques hint at a progression from the intentionally bland-yet-wry paintings of the Lodge. For example, “Cram” contains rows of ghost-like characters, suspended over a red background in such a way as to appear that they are applied on layers of overlapping glass. The visual depth is striking and makes the painting seem to shift focus between layers.
Neil Farber's Slugging.
A surprisingly pleasing moment in Slugging is an “Untitled” in which white paint drops on a black background become little, individual faces. It looks like Farber grabbed a paint splash tray and went to town, inspired by the Kodama (Japanese tree spirits) from Princess Mononoke.
Utilizing axonometric (or “vertical”) perspective, two more “Untitled” paintings liven up the end of the exhibition. Each is a mass of people, shoulder-to-shoulder up to the edge of the paper. Originally used in Asian scroll painting, axonometric perspective presupposes composition as narrative and depicts a scene from around 45 degrees off the ground. The angle encourages the eye to freely scan the painting, unrestricted by a single, static point of view. The two “Untitled”s carry the eye around in a sweep of activity and bustle, and you’re left wondering why you were looking at it in the first place.
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Through May 21,
Edward Thorp Gallery,
210 11th Ave., 212-691-6565.
