Between 11 May - 30 June 2024 Alex Farrar is featured in the group exhibition En om vier uur? Slapen. at RIB, Rotterdam.
The artist is showcasing a series of Suits that he realised in the past few years; indeed, in 2007—without any prior experience or technical advice—Alex Farrar made a suit from scratch to wear whenever representing himself as an artist. When it needed replacing he made a new one. After five ‘suits’ Farrar was able to make a suit that was indistinguishable from a professionally crafted one, and that concluded the project. This last suit is not on display, nor will it ever be. It is not an artwork. The artist keeps it the way one usually stores their best suit, in a garment bag, hanging in a wardrobe, but he will not wear it.
An exercise for insomniacs: imagine a room and then slowly strip it of everything inside. The objects, every little thing, the furniture, then continue with the windows, the doors, the skirting boards. Then remove all colour and the corners with their shadows until a completely white space remains. No details. No dimensions. A cloud-like nothing. Now your thoughts will have difficulty finding anything—a damp spot, a half-finished drill hole, a collapsed cobweb—to attach to and thus keep you from sleeping.
The first ‘suits’ were not only ill-fitting, they also showed all sorts of striking details, odd seams, unusual stitching … details that stood out. Ten years were used by the artist to gradually eliminate them. The ‘suits’ attracted less and less consternation in the public. If his suit is desire materialised, as Laura van Grinsven writes in her text about the work1, after the sixth one the desire became weightless. We imagine the artist standing in front of his wardrobe, staring at the garment bag.
