under the eye and pen of Katie Kresser, LaFarge is revealed to be ahead of his time on many fronts””in his late theoretical writings, his sometimes daringly compressed pictorial space, and in his insistence on a certain epistemic humility before his painterly subjects. Kresser suggests that LaFarge, himself a believing Roman Catholic, anticipated the thought of Catholic philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, both of whom worked at a high view of artistic making as a fundamental mode of being on par with the human capacity to know or to communicate. Kresser discusses LaFarge’s stubborn decision to forego certainty or stylistic brand in favor of steadfastly beholding the mystery of being, as uniquely manifest in the fragile humanly wrought thing. In LaFarge’s view, the artist participates in the wildness and unpredictability of the Creation itself by becoming a servant of the work of art””itself now become a further extension of Being.
In his book Real Presences, George Steiner discusses at length the concept of intellectual hospitality and the need for the reader to freshly submit to the “presence” communicated in a given text or work of art””to achieve an unguarded gaze and receptivity that allows the work to do its work. Steiner goes on to say, “It takes uncanny strength and abstention from re-cognition, from implicit reference, to read the world and not the text of the world as it has been previously encoded for us”””in other words, to submit to the thing seen, not to its culturally conditioned simulacrum. The LaFarge that Kresser paints for us is just such a receptive soul who persistently attempts to achieve that unguarded gaze.
LaFarge’s expansive intellect would not let him seek a facile stylistic brand. His paintings are exploratory even as they participate in traditional idioms””and therefore occasionally seem weak or unfinished. It is as though the artist says, “I am a servant of the form, of the tradition, and of this passing moment of looking.