There's an incredibly bad TV show on the Fox network called
24
. It's post 9.11 fear-frenzy television about a tough "counterterrorism" agent named Jack who has to break all the rules in order to save the country again and again. In an hour-long episode, Jack is likely to shoot two or three terrorists, snap someone's neck in close-quarters combat, accidentally torture an innocent woman, steal a car or helicopter, punch out a co-worker
who's slowing him down with tiresome "due process" hang-ups and maybe disarm a nerve gas canister or a nuclear weapon or two. While he's driving his big, black government-issue SUV between shoot-outs and neck-snappings, he uses taxpayer cell phone minutes to patch up his rocky relationship with his hot girlfriend and his estranged daughter. The frantic pacing and non-stop action all come to a head when it's time to cut to a commercial break-the screen splits into several small scenes, a sort of action movie picture-in-picture technology where everything is racing to a final climactic conclusion. It's a style that's familiar to comic book aficionados and people who watch Guy Ritchie movies.
In the very different but complementary work of two painters, Patrick McFarlin and Evri Kwong, narratives created within such frames are used not to showcase dramatic moments of manufactured tension, but to reveal stunning moments of real social and compositional tension.
McFarlin-whose eyes suck up light and color more like a mantis than a man, seeing everything from shadow to sun in not only multiple hues, but endless perspectives-has been laying his brushes in great blotches of color to create portraits, landscapes and oddball projects of sculptural, cultural engineering in New Mexico for many years now. Fresh from a fellowship at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo, Ireland, his latest body of work, shown alongside Kwong's at Dwight Hackett Projects (2879 All Trades Road, 474-4043; through March 25), is the most resonant in years, throbbing like a phantom limb, or an arthritic joint sensing a storm, long after one has left the gallery.
From Downpatrick to Blacksod
is a modest enough collection of daily sketches, mostly oil on paper, the paint soaking into the pulp as the artist's insectoid eyes compartmentalized and coveted the land before him, but the evidence of that energy, of that insatiable lament where McFarlin absorbs the sadness, grace and eternity of the land instills the works with a documentary greatness. The works are arranged in various frames on the paper; the horizon line is never a seamless distance, but a broken assemblage of mismatched vistas, glimpses of possible destinations, memories of low and high points, of dark and light places that have pasted themselves into McFarlin's memory and then peeled themselves out like wet leaves laying next to and atop of each other on his working surface. Each painting is simple, the colors plain, the imagery graphic, but the effect is complex. When a lone figure or form dissects the patchwork horizon of McFarlin's paintings, it's as though Ad Reinhardt has sat down with Mark Rothko's palette to teach David Hockney a lesson: A broken panorama of fractured perspective isn't cool, urban theory-it's the soulful, fundamental truth of life. It's what the artist sees in quiet moments. It's the stuff the rest of us fail to notice.
McFarlin wasn't born with the ability to saturate himself in his perceptions and transform them into an understandable essay of emotion and form; he's been at it for a long time, including focused painting bouts at California's Snow Mountain Zen Center. And, lingering around McFarlin's studio retreat in those days, the nine- or 10-year-old Evri Kwong didn't miss a trick. The two were reunited last year when the San Francisco-based Kwong had a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute and the concept of exhibiting side by side came to life, but it wasn't until the work was hung that the similarities, the use of frames and boxes for narrative voice and compositional emphasis, became entirely clear. That both artists gravitated toward such a like strategy is a coincidence (McFarlin was a much different painter when the young Kwong was kicking around his studio) and the ready similarities end there-Kwong's work is altogether grittier, with a raw and vibrant focus on human interaction, contradiction and disparity.
In "Rocketman," executed in Kwong's characteristic materials of oil paint and Sharpie permanent marker (what could be cooler?), two panels illustrate opposite points of human reference. On the left a family of Sharpie-sketched people sit down to an opulent meal, plates being placed before them against a backdrop of
Jetsons
-style silver gleam. In the adjacent frame, a painted figure stands on a colorful hillside, carefully aiming a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher at a passing airliner. The events-the dinner and the attack-feel simultaneous and the disconnect, the total inability of the inhabitants of each side, of the painting to understand those of the other side is plain and painful, solidified by the straightforward, graphic mastery of the drawing. It is a thousand newscasts and op-ed pieces rolled into one moment of tense and inexplicable calm before hopeless chaos. Kwong presents a multi-framed clash of ideologies in an overt and distinctive style, addictive without interfering in his geo-political portraiture.
An alarming narrative of war prisoners unfolds in "Dizzyland," Kwong's title piece for this body of work. People are detained, tortured and searched in a frenzied story of black marks against yellow, as packed with drama as the mélange of terrible scenes unfolding in an episode of
24
, but here Kwong's strong line and potent color coupled with an intentionally naîve figurative portrayal, rings with the sad, lonely truth of human failure rather than the puffy-chested, faux-justice of nighttime television. Consuming the left half of "Dizzyland" is the scene that's always missing from
24
, the view from high above the city, framed in the dark parapets of tall buildings, a landscape of cars and corporations, a melting pot going about its business oblivious to our own shame spying on us from above. It's a horrible view, an expert gift from Kwong, who quietly accepts the fact that he'll be resented for giving it.
