It is particularly apt that a Professor of Language and Linguistics creates works of art that contain examples of the slippery contingency of visual forms. In Gustavo Fares’s both abstract and representational paintings and drawings - though each seem more to occupy an indeterminate space between such simple categories - marks and forms slide and tremble, appearing at one moment to describe a dune or cloud bank and at another to simply be a layered record of process and formal inventiveness. For many artists abstraction and representation are mutually exclusive modes, but Fares shows nuanced observation, whether to the sensitivity of glinting sunlight or an awareness of the optical tricks of two adjacent stokes of differently colored paints, transcends and connects the different schools of painting.

Fares embodies that hybrid-like quality, combining a rigorous aesthetic with an often loose application and attack. Building his surfaces through rapid gesture and considered and carefully layered strokes of color, the artist creates works that at first glance seem to be “action paintings.” But on longer and closer inspection, the paintings and drawings reveal a rigorous aesthetic underpinning. The network of strokes and marks are locked in tight order. In the landscapes earth and sky have an equivalent mass and substance, while in the abstract works positive and negative space vie for equal presence and consideration. Like poetic language Fares’s work is meant to be both experienced and read.

Fares eschews contemporary art’s fascination with irony. He demonstrates that the processes and materials of painting are still capable of offering viewers a unique way of looking at the world – a window that frames and orders perceptions and decision-making. It may well be that the academic Fares’s interest in the intangibility of language is countered by the weighty tactile presence of his other calling as a visual artist.

Like another Argentinean born artist, Jorge Luis Borges, Fares admits an interest in labyrinths - both as games of delight and confusion and as complicated twisting passages which ultimately may lead to some great truth or meaning. And like a labyrinth, Fares’s paintings and drawings challenge and confound, yet the works reward the persistent viewer – the seeker of the pleasures of process and experience.