New Haven Independent

The work consists of three elements. On the south of the lot, a kind of broken fence has uneven slats, like a set of rotting teeth, painted with cartoonish yet ghostly white soldiers (pictured). In front of them lies a wooden figure in white, almost like driftwood, with a scraggly tree growing up from a hole in his chest. On the eastern side of the lot a square plywood board is painted with more soldiers, with planes and military equipment above, and below their feet, a bevy of victims surrounding this quotation by Martin Luther King: “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power, we have guided missiles and misguided men.”

Ibar, a French-born artist, said he began doing work with a social and political aspect in 2003, at the start of the Iraq War, when he was part of a group of activist young artists in Providence. “What really bothers me about wars,” he said, “is how the governments disguise them, all the aspects.”

So Ibar wanted to have his work out in the public arena, away from an interior space and the often too hermetic art world. He said some of the soldier figures had been deployed in an installation a year ago at Norwalk Community College, but here, on the outside is where they belong.

“They breathe much better right here,” he said, “behind the bus stop.”

Graves and Gabriel got it. Not only did they both think the art was “cool,” to use their all-purpose positive assessment, but Gabriel pointed out that the faces on the soldiers along the fence were blank. “They’re blank and white. They’re shadows,” she said, as she kept one eye on the art and one at the bus stop to see if her ride was coming. “We’ve sent so many kids over there, and we don’t know who they are.”

They did know of some — five kids from Career who they said had enlisted last year, and also a Spanish teacher in the reserves who was called up. Graves and Gabriel said that they were not aware of how they had fared.

Rain had made the patch of gravel between the bus benches and the wall particularly muddy. There was another quality that Gabriel picked up on, the relation of the art to the setting. “What I really like about this stuff,” she said, “was that it looks like it belongs here.”

Indeed, the Lot has two high walls, brick, with patches of mortar splatting outwards at the joints, and except for their being tagged by graffiti here and there, entirely rough and blank. In short, it appeared to be a universal urban setting, a bad setting, a place where soldiers might have already been through, or were on their way there, perhaps to line a few of the enemy up against one of those walls for execution.

“But it’s not all grim,” Ibar was at pains to point out in a telephone interview from his studio in New York City. “The colors, the reds and the blues,” he said, which are especially prominent on the jagged fence, “are redemptive.” So, of course, is the tree arising from the chest of the dead figure.

The tree and the leaf, Ibar added, are universal symbols for him. He might, he suggested, have been influenced in these particular images by an unconscious osmosis from drawings by the world-famous German artist Anselm Keefer and even some anti-war imagery by Yoko Ono from the ’70s. His new work is about fallen tree parts, which he cuts up, then paints the insides, giving them back life through DNA-ish patterns of color.

Graves and Gabriel saw a rectangular patch of blue suddenly lurching across the streetscape. It turned out to be their CT Transit bus taking them in the direction of home. They dashed off.

They left the Lot, for the moment, vacant of people, but surely not empty.

For more information about Guided Men or Ibar, who has previously exhibited in New Haven at the City-Wide Open Studios, the contact is Jemma Williams at artspacenh.org. Ibar’s installation will be at the Lot through May.