Robert Christie

Longtime Saskatchewan painter experiments with colour in multilayered works.

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Veteran Saskatoon painter Robert Christie has been busy reinventing and experimenting with various types of abstraction over the last decade – with help from some great artists of the 20th century.

Let’s start with Christie’s monochromatic paintings. Look closely. They are not as monochromatic as you might expect. 

Subtle differences emerge even as a single colour marches across the canvas. Those differences, caused by adding or subtracting pigment during the painting process, create slight tonal variations. It’s like looking at the ocean. Even on calm sunny days, there are slight variations in its blueness.

Other differences come from turning a two-dimensional canvas into what almost becomes a three-dimensional sculptural work. Strips of thin, painted plywood or veneer are attached to the canvas, sometimes in an ordered way and sometimes in a haphazard stack, increasing the thickness in certain areas and casting thin shadows on the work.

Such paintings can be found in Christie’s solo exhibition, The Red Studio, on view at the Art Gallery of Swift Current in southwestern Saskatchewan until Feb. 27. The show will travel to the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery in 2023. Its two dozen paintings were made from 2008 to 2020. The name of the show is borrowed from a 1911 Henri Matisse painting, The Red Studio, in which small renditions of the artist’s works appear to float in a two-dimensional red space.

Both Matisse and Christie engage in illusion with their respective versions of The Red Studio. Matisse’s painting makes a three-dimensional studio look two-dimensional by causing furniture and architecture to disappear – well, almost. Christie’s painting, The Red Studio Two, turns what we expect to be a two-dimensional painting into a three-dimensional sculptural work by layering pieces of wood onto the canvas in parallel rows, making the work appear as architectural as the wall of a building covered in wooden siding. In fact, Christie’s studio, a few kilometers outside Saskatoon, is clad in red-painted siding.

“Matisse’s Red Studio brings about a dynamic tension between illusion and flatness through his use of pictorial devices that suggest deep space, juxtaposed with the flattening effect of the all-over red,” Levi Nicholat, director of Christie’s Saskatoon dealer, The Gallery/Art Placement Inc., writes in a catalogue essay for the Swift Current exhibition. 

“Christie’s work, on the other hand, complicates our initial assumptions of total flatness by incorporating surface dimension and positioning the painting as an object in the viewer’s physical space.”

Christie’sThe Red Studio Two is a massive work that measures 96 inches by 79 inches and leans against the wall of the Swift Current gallery. A similar Christie painting titled The Red Studio is in the collection of the Remai Modern in Saskatoon and is not included in this show.

Some of Christie’s monochromatic works are reminiscent of colour field paintings from the 1960s. Saskatchewan artist William Perehudoff is one such influence on Christie. But there’s a major difference between their work. Perehudoff offers two or more strong colours that compete with another on one canvas. His paintings look busy compared with Christie’s tranquil single-colour works. Christie has removed the noise.

In some pieces, Christie also echoes the work of Saskatchewan-born abstract artist Agnes Martin, who is celebrated for her painted grids, not unlike the square patterns of Prairie fields as seen from an airplane. Christie’s grids have much larger squares than in Martin’s works but they have a similar calming effect. Check out Christie’s Two Levels of Blue, boards assembled to create row upon row of squares.

The stacking of painted plywood rectangles on Christie’s canvases was inspired by Joseph Beuys, a 20th-century German artist. Christie encountered one of his works in Berlin in 2012 composed of large square blackboards haphazardly tossed onto the floor. Christie reacted by stacking strips of wood onto canvas. Some of the wooden pieces are covered in painted canvas and others are just painted. The result is like a multilayered collage.

Examine any painting by Christie and you're bound to find many sources of inspiration, not just famous European artists but also a humble red studio in the Saskatchewan countryside. ■ 

Robert Christie: The Red Studio at the Art Gallery of Swift Current in Saskatchewan from Jan. 9 to Feb. 27, 2021. 

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