Nicolas Moufarrege
Flash Art
November 1984

Cable Gallery

In this, his first one-man exhibition, James Nares presents works as devoid of superfluity as any I have ever seen.  His is the art of the glyph, the sign and the gesture become form.  Conscious and unconscious fluids, intermingled, become tinted liquid, oil of elastic vapor that holds its breath, pinches its waist, constricts to the point that is the departure of reciprocity.  Wheels in wheels, circles in spirals, liberated arabesques, the ever-increasing, ever-diminishing ripples in the pond of existential interrogation. 

There, Nares' talent casts the pebble that rolls, skips and jumps.  The measure of life is its fugacity.  Nares' brushstrokes become lines in motion; lines that discourse on their origin, their ambivalence, their trajectory, and their very motion.  The final image is concise without restraint, a purple rune that resolves the dynamic into an ultimate static, burgundy, black and mustard, a plasticity that summarizes time as a simultaneous experience.

It is not easy work.  Despite a seeming simplicity, Nares' images can be baffling.  No more and no less than existence itself.  His distillations are those of an anarchist's negative confession.  An early painting of 1977, a bright red cross turned on its side, an X, against a black background, provides clues to the understanding of the work.

So we start all over again; we turn the hourglass, lay down the rope and prepare new knots.  Images rise from the plane of inscription.  There are palms of victory, Mayan dramas, and Chinese brushstrokes.  The current flows through the heart, and Icarus flies again.  That's what the paintings are about.  And more.  As though something sacred is in the air, they function to awaken desire as we face states of mind and stories that aren't stories.  Just images that will themselves with an Eastern politeness and a hermetic majesty; vertigo becomes ecstasy.

James Nares' work is not unlike the haiku; the image coils back on itself. Neither describing nor defining, merely saying that! with a movement so immediate that what is designated becomes what is only because of the moving brush.