Defying the Laws of Physics

Artist Etienne Zack reflects on the relationship between bureaucracies and information with delirious architectures composed of books and stacked documents.

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I’m fascinated by the instabilities, precariousness and rickety Byzantine house-of-cards sensibility at the heart of Etienne Zack’s art.

For the past few years, his big, colourful and exacting paintings have consisted of dreamlike structures made of books or bound and/or redacted documents, often supported by truncheons or bare fluorescent tubes. They are like rooms built by delirious prisoners using the detritus from a mysterious incident at a book repository.

Zack’s works hold subtle echoes of French artist Christian Boltanski’s installations, which evoke the scale of loss during the Holocaust via dangling, dimmed light bulbs and rows of out-of-focus portraits that suggest a dark bureaucracy. Threads of Gerhard Richter’s soft black-and-white portraits, and his scuffed, layered abstraction, also seem present at times. Scale is important to Zack's large paintings and their ability to immerse viewers allows entry to an Escher-esque world where imagined structures seem to unfold and duplicate beyond all borders.

The six works on view until June 30 at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, take things down a notch. These smaller, more compact variants allow easier digestion of the dense and internally expansive nature of what we might call “the book series.”

There’s less commitment to meticulously crafted lighting effects, though the works are no less effective for it. Three coloured pieces depart from his usual methods with rich gradient washes of pinks, blues and yellows of varying intensity. The colours cover his familiar physics-defying structures of redacted and obscured texts. The effect is created by letting paint pool on the paper and spraying it with water. These rich and seductive pieces invite examination of the idiosyncratic structures within.

Aside from one outlier piece, the mixed-media collage 1984 (Glasnost), which feels like a somewhat reductive study, the other two works, Fissure and Voids, are monochromatic. I find them harder to read, more obscure, and even (comparatively) roughly hewn.

Where we were invited to explore and decipher objects amidst dense layers, now the whole shebang seems to recede and shrink, fading into a palimpsest, making way for something new. Reading the images as they appear in the gallery, from left to right, it’s as though they are meant to fade to grey.

Zack, who was born in Montreal and now resides in the curious half-Canadian outpost of Point Roberts, Washington, says the effect of the gel-transfer technique varies depending on the presence of colour. “When you do image transfers like this, you actually lose fragments of the picture during the process so there’s information missing and it’s definitely more evident in the black-and-white pieces,” he says.

“The net result of reducing scale is that you have to keep the focus sharp. They’re very concentrated. The photographic aspect helps because they already contain so much information. So when you combine photo images with the painting, it adds to the density and overall intensity.”

These six pieces, included in a show that also features work on paper by British Columbia artists Renée Van Helm and Sonny Assu, feel like a bridge to Zack’s next body of work. Is he at an ending of sorts?

“I sort of cannibalized all the previous book paintings,” he says. “The book motif is still part of the new work, but I’ve been working on a transition in the past year and a half and these works are part of that. These may be the last iterations of the last five years’ work.”

The gel-transfer technique also presages a greater use of black-and-white photographs in future work. “Using photographs is a huge shift because I knew I had to address the surface of the books at some point,” says Zack. “There are so many surfaces within the work. They become paintings within paintings.

“In painting, you can invent your own laws of physics. There’s a flattening of our lives in this society and we need to deepen our lives, to make them three-dimensional again. When something’s been flattened, it’s been reduced to a lower, functional medium. We need to make everything a shape, and now we need to re-introduce depth instead of all these facades.”

So, it seems the confounding structures that Zack has dazzled us with in recent years may soon reappear, remade, remodeled ... and repopulated. I look forward to seeing how depth is applied to the surfaces of his fantastic, dreamlike structures and to a return to the usual grand scale of his paintings. ■

Works on Paper is on view at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver from May 26 to June 30, 2018.

Equinox Gallery

3642 Commercial Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V5N 4G2

604-736-2405

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