The Subject is Colour: Rhys Douglas Farrell and Marcia Harris

Written by Curator, Ryan Doherty

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An exhibition bringing together Rhys Douglas Farrell and Marcia Harris may, at a glance, appear to be an unexpected pairing. The former is a minimalist builder of layer after layer  of precise and eye-bending patterns, and the latter is a realist conjuring painterly evocations of familiar urban landmarks. Deeper reflection, however, unveils several shared characteristics, most notably their similarly emphatic and practiced approach to employing colour.

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Rhys Douglas Farrell’s work is steeped in colour. He draws upon a massive legacy of colourists and hard-edge painters from the de Stijl movement of Mondrian, early minimalists like Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, Op artists such as Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, and from Canada, Guido Molinari, Rita Letendre, and Calgary’s own, Harry Kiyooka . Masters of colour, pattern, and optical play, their works serve as critical points of departure for Farrell’s own practice, a growing collection of murals, panels, and sculptures pulsating with visceral combinations of coloured lines, dots, and geometric invention.

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Farrell is similarly seduced by the principles posited by French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul (1839), who noted the mesmerizing effects of simultaneous contrast. This phenomenon is evident in Farrell’s sympathetic and studied application of colours, which, when juxtaposed, undergo a transformative shift, engaging the viewer in an optical dance. The most dramatic manifestation of this effect is seen with complementary colours. However, Farrell treads carefully here, balancing academic disruption with intuitive subtlety and experimenting with colours all over the wheel. 

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Credit, too, must be given to Josef Albers, amongst the most infamous of colourists whose landmark 1963 book, Interactions of Color, continues to prove invaluable to Farrell. Acutely aware of the slippery nature of colour, Albers writes on the first page, “In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is—as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”

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With this arsenal of precedents and affinities, Farrell’s nuanced explorations of colour and pattern become increasingly complex when they make the leap into three-dimensional space. His recent sculptures are deliberately pared down to temper confusion, isolating details of previous works that are cut out, blown up, folded, and curved into unassuming geometric forms. Consider his new work, Silent Stride. Circling the sculpture, the viewer can observe an unassuming ribbon striped with blue, pink, and grey tones in myriad variations that overlap and intersect. He reminds us, too, that any sense of the selected hues, tones, or tints as static is an illusion; his colours are in constant flux, shifting in the play of light and shadow in the room. It speaks further to Farrell’s fascination with optical effects that his seemingly rudimentary sculptures only present their complexity through deliberate attention. If you are not yet bewildered, position multiple sculptures as an architectural environment and the interplay becomes almost kaleidoscopic.

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This serves as a fitting moment to reflect on the paintings of Marcia Harris. For one, an exploration of architectural forms is of unmistakable interest to Harris, as evidenced by her growing catalogue of renowned, even notorious, buildings familiar within the urban landscapes of Alberta and beyond. For another, her methodical application of colour similarly balances theory and practice while capturing, even embellishing, the potent impact of layering light and shadow. Here, Harris looks to her own pedigreed list of influences, which includes Impressionists from Manet to Morisot, and contemporary masters such as George Shaw, Adrian Ghenie, and David Hockney, all widely celebrated for their command of light.

For Harris, the act of painting is a playful yet deliberate endeavour, where she revels in the unpredictability of colour interactions and embraces the beauty of unresolved moments. Even deciding her subject is motivated by colour and whether she is compelled by the distinctive way they harmonize or unsettle, or how light and shadow accentuate the scene.  Her process begins with unplanned and uninhibited underpainting, typically with generous strokes of mid-tone greens and oranges, but just as often spray painted in neon colours evoking graffiti. With her canvas prepared, Harris builds her compositions layer by layer, allowing each decision to inform the next in a continuous chain of creative evolution. Like Farrell, her choices derive from an unwavering faith in spontaneity and intuition yet informed by a theoretical grounding of colour, again through the likes of Albers, but also Yale scholar David Scott Kastan’s landmark 2018 book, On Color.  

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Harris is keenly aware that “overplanning leads to disappointment” and instead allows her works to emerge with energy and dynamism, even if that comes at the expense of clarity and resolution. She aims to express this vitality through colour, gesture, surface, and composition as a call to action to challenge our perception of familiar urban spaces. Recently, Harris has pushed this condition further, leaving the unpeopled and stark “solitude of a building” and entering their interior spaces to observe its occupants. Among her newest paintings, super store features a typical day at the much beloved Luke’s Drug Mart and is a superlative example of a lively interior both in its painterly approach, palette, and composition, as well as its bubbling social atmosphere.

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Brought together for this exhibition, The Subject is Colour underscores a shared fascination with viewer experience and the transformative power of colour in space – depicted or otherwise. Whether an optically hypnotic abstraction or an alluring depiction of the urban spaces we inhabit, both artists deftly navigate the intricate interplay of hues, tones, light, and shadow to produce works that stimulate and seduce.