Garry Fabian Miller: The Colours
Until January 30; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

Garry Fabian Miller hasn’t used a camera to make his photographs since 1984. Since that time he has worked every day in the pitch black of his dark room, finding his way around by touch, and shining light through objects and coloured liquids directly onto light-sensitive paper. After eight years making “photograms” of plants and leaves, Miller surrendered in 1992 to his truest passion, light itself.

Fabian Miller’s works come in series which most often take a year to make. The exposure time for each photograph can last minutes or days, and the artist only makes changes to what he does in tiny increments, performing a perpetual experiment to see what will happen next. His greatest inspiration comes not from any artist but from the daily, domestic experiments of evolutionary biologist, Charles Darwin.

Ingleby Gallery’s association with the Dartmoor-based artist goes back 11 years, during which time he has created hundreds of unique prints conjuring up celestial events, city lights and watery horizons. Their intense, spiritual abstraction echoes Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, but their surfaces are glossy, precise, unyielding.

Ingleby has just unveiled the latest series of work by Fabian Miller. The curvy, burning sensuality of much of his previous work is set aside in favour of austere concentric squares in various colour combinations. The comparison with Josef Albers’s relentless colour experiment, Homage to the Square, is inescapable.

Some of the combinations, especially Orange Aqua, put your teeth on edge. All the action happens where edges meet, like the neon pink glow which radiates from the cracks between the squares in Blue, Yellow, Red, bringing to mind phosphenes – those dancing colours which appear when your eyelids are pressed down. It’s as if the image has bounced out of your retina and onto the paper rather than the other way round.

Almost every print in this exhibition contains a mixture of hard edges and soft, shifting contours. Sometimes shapes float into view that weren’t initially visible. Even the photographs themselves float physically from their frames, hovering an inch above the surface. Almost every print induces a sense that you have not quite focussed correctly, your binocular vision has gone agley, you are seeing things which may not be there.

Fabian Miller takes daily walks in the country and distils what he sees, crystallising it in the darkness of his studio, shining light through liquid onto paper much as the world filters through our eyes and onto our retina. He may be largely concerned with a search for some profound equilibrium, but for me, Fabian Miller’s work is a challenge to the mechanics of seeing. It’s as if we look through his own eyes, emerging from the darkness, blinking into the light.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 06.12.09