Mina Totino

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Mina Totino, “Twisting,” 2020, installation view at Mónica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, showing “October,” 2019

oil on canvas 82” x 76” (left) and “All Blue,” 2020, oil on canvas, 60” x 57” (photo by Stan Douglas)

Vancouver artist Mina Totino’s painting process is slow and immersive, which is also the way her works should be viewed. Standing up close to her large paintings means they take over your peripheral vision, enveloping you in sumptuous paint handling. Totino uses a small round brush less than an inch in diameter to build up one colour per translucent layer. Even if the final layer is white, as in September, 2019, or gray, like October, 2019, the surface has depth, or to borrow Totino’s word, sustenance. Each brushstroke is a self-conscious gesture, a small moment necessary for the whole. The surfaces of these two mostly monochromatic paintings are melodious; two or three small, roughly rectangular shapes disrupt the monochromes, clamping their wispy weightlessness.  

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Mina Totino, “Twisting,” 2020, installation view at Mónica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, showing “September,” 2019

oil on canvas, 82” x 76” inches (left) and “October,” 2019, oil on canvas 82” x 76” (photo by Stan Douglas)

Totino, whose exhibition, Twisting, is on view at the Mónica Reyes Gallery in Vancouver until Aug. 1, suggests viewers have to give up their egos, just for a split second, in experiencing her work. The paintings are large enough, and the gallery small enough, to feel nestled in with the canvases. There’s a purity to this idea, and it does explain Totino’s disdain for definitions. Although viewers might feel the presence of art history, especially 20th-century abstraction, Totino avoids slotting her paintings into any genre. Her attention to the edges, and the specificity of the dimensions, including the depth of each canvas, emphasizes their “objectness.” The late Robert Ryman, an American associated with minimalism and conceptual art, is Totino’s favourite painter. She has an affinity for his deep interest in materiality. Also a painter of monochromatic compositions, he wanted the materials to speak for themselves. Her canvases are custom built to the dimensions of Ryman’s work. 

To emphasize their existence as objects, Totino paints the sides of the canvases, making autonomous slim compositions with what she calls “throwaway gestures.” Even the part of the painting you cannot see – the top – is painted to reflect, aura-like, on the white wall. This explains why there’s an acid-yellow glow on the wall above All Blue. The skinny compositions on the side of her small works force the eye to bounce between the painting and the frame. 

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Mina Totino, “Twisting,” 2020

installation view at Mónica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver (photo by Stan Douglas)

Painting tends to be a personal journey within a larger trajectory, being as steeped in the Western art historical canon as it is. We can easily forget the joy of simply experiencing the painted surface as we consider how a work fits into the canon, or makes a statement about it. Totino considers her artistic path to be on a spiral trajectory, referring back to other artists, but more so her own work, finding connections to the past, but also moving forward at the same time. This can be seen in the strata of her paintings, where each layer is always partially visible so we have a glimpse of what came before and how it affects what follows. ■ 

Twisting is on view at the Mónica Reyes Gallery in Vancouver from June 27 to Aug. 1, 2020.

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