Tim Forbes is one of those practitioners.  His paintings seek connection and implore active engagement while at the same time deploying traditional materials and modernist formal devices.  Conceived and realized as they are – bridging the conceptual, narrative, abstract, colour field, hard-edge, and minimalist – they defy straight-forward classification.

His paintings are classically minimalist in many respects – the muted black and white palette, the smooth, enlarged formal masses that hold space with effortless tension, but they are also ‘chatty’, performative, and deliberately un-finite. 

Forbes diptychs and triptychs have multiple configurations which draw the viewer into a physical dialogue and co-creatorship.  Thus, they depart from their predecessors, but they do not denounce.  Forbes’ Relative Form, Pattern Recognition, and Abstract Algorithm series demonstrate the depth of the communicative ability of abstract vocabulary and essentialized form.  Through embracing the vocabulary of their ancestors, his painting avoids us-and-them mentality, consciously sidesteps dichotomous thinking, and questions and contributes rather than universalizes and concludes.  Forbes arranges mass, volume, shape, and colour to novel realization, demonstrating just how adept the formal vocabulary is within a conceptual framework.

Forbes stated in a 2019 interview with New York art market consultant Roz Joseph, “I like black, it’s a colour that’s made up its mind.” And Forbes is not the first artist to engage with the decisiveness of a paired down palette to test the limits of composition or solve complex art historical worldly problems. Georges Braque and the early analytical cubists feared colour: “[colour] could give rise to sensations that would interfere with their [the Cubists] new conception of space.”1  Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl artists used only primary colours because they saw those as the building blocks of their vision for the new modern world, and Kandinsky would strategically use colour to represent or instill specific emotions and synesthetic ideas.

In the black and white camp, Forbes shares company with a great number of artists including Guido Molinari, and Paul-Émile Borduas.  Both artists for different reasons worked in black and white to solve certain formal problems.  Molinari to achieve spatial equivalence and background/foreground reversibility and Borduas to banish figure/ground relationships and achieve pure automatic expression.  Braque, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Borduas and Molinari deployed a paired down palette to create a new world or talk about spiritual and universal ideals.

However, for Forbes there is irony behind the choice in palette.  Indeed, his paintings are solving complex formal and spatial problems, they are also talking about the world we live in right now, which is a complicated space with nuance, inequality, racism, passion – a place with issues that are decidedly not black and white.  It is the pared-down quality of the black and white framework that pulls the viewer inside the complexity of the issues with greater facility and allows one to understand ideas anew from different perspectives.  Forbes is not abstracting for an idealized or transcendental figuration of the future like the modernists, he is abstracting the now as a method of analysis and aesthetic compassion, but using a modernist toolkit.

Forbes created Marker (image above) on May 29, 2021, two days after Canada was shaken by the headlines of an unmarked mass grave of 215 First Nations children detected by ground-penetrating radar at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Tk'emlups Territory. The first headline of many that followed over the next months in Canadian newspapers.  .

With Marker Forbes paints the reality that the past is also the present, not something that is possible to forget, or bury.  As the dead are marked through ceremony and stone, one is reminded that when it comes to grief and loss, memory and remains are poignantly interconnected.

Marker is a diptych, conceived in black and white with two different configurations. The horizontal configuration of the panels features three large rounded forms that rise from the bottom of the canvas in smooth mounds.  The central mound is narrower and requires the diptych to come together to complete its form. 

The mounds could signify a number of things – this is where Forbes’ conceptual approach becomes open-ended and collaborative – they might signify individuals, the buried, marker stones, etc., it is up to the viewer to read this as they need to or want to, but what remains is that the central ‘character’ or mound requires a physical coming together for it to be fully realized. 

The vertical orientation of the panels creates a large black ovular mass that hovers above a narrow elongated ovular black mass resting on the ground line.  Is this the expanse of memory looming above the remains of loss? 

There are multiple readings, but unlike early reception theory which put the onus of the readings on the viewer while the artwork sat there, mute, waiting to be read, Forbes’ paintings get right in there with you.

Reading these paintings requires physical and conceptual action. They must be interacted with to be understood and they challenge one to find their multiple perspectives. The Kantian disinterested viewer be damned. These paintings cannot be understood ‘all at once’ in a flash of worthy aesthetic insight as Kant or Greenberg insisted a ‘good’ painting should.  These paintings make the point that complicated issues require time and effort to understand the nuances of their multi-faceted nature.

1. Georges Braque quoted by John Richardson, “Crimes Against the Cubists,” New York Review of Books, Issue 30, no. 10 (1983), 32-34