ROBERT SCOTT: "Copper Slag," Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery, Feb. 5 to April 12, 2015

by

ROBERT SCOTT: Copper Slag

Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery

Feb. 5 to April 12, 2015

By Jeffrey Spalding

Since the early 1970s, Robert Scott has made important and valued contributions to the legacy of abstract painting. Born in Melfort, Sask., and educated at the Alberta College of Art and Design, and the University of Alberta, Scott lives and works in Edmonton and at his renovated schoolhouse in the village of Cadillac in southwestern Saskatchewan. In the 1970s, Edmonton and Saskatoon were bastions of modernist formalism. They were home to countless artists of attainment dedicated to abstraction. The leading public and commercial galleries in these cities were avid supporters of the movement, making significant purchases, exhibitions and catalogues. It propelled the creation of an ebullient scene with a critical mass of dedicated creators, both senior and aspiring, associated with the world’s then-dominant progressive aesthetic and stylistic thought. Today, art museums and schools seem to have tired of modernist abstraction; opportunities to see formalist art are now few and far between. An artist making a commitment to modernism is finding a sure-fire way to ensure official neglect.

Perhaps Scott didn’t notice? He has relentlessly continued to evolve and grow his abstract art in comparative isolation. Decade after decade, he has made innovative leaps that keep his art alive, fresh and vital. So it should not have been much of a surprise that as I encountered this exhibition of 10 new paintings I didn’t immediately recognize them as works by Scott. In the past, I have reveled in his energetic, expressive mark-making, the artist raking his fingers through lavishly thick layers of impasto paint in bold, often impish, lurid colour combinations with over-sprayed interference pigment counterpoints. This quiet, serene and confidently reductive exhibition seems like a dramatic departure.

Gone is the colour, the density and – oh, yes – even the paint. These new works are created by drawing with copper slag using a variety of unconventional non-art tools. A byproduct of the copper-smelting process, copper slag is used in various construction and building applications. In Scott’s case, he employs it akin to a powdered pigment affixed to the canvas using acrylic Rhoplex medium. In the past, Scott has made some massive, magisterial monochrome paintings. These new ones pare down the process even further. As remarked upon in the instructive catalogue essay, Scott ransacks recent historical art for inspiration. A reference to Matisse’s The Dance (1909-1910) is detected; I thought I spotted what would be an uncharacteristic, unexpected reference to Dada artist Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Certain of the works seem to echo eccentric abstraction from Kandinsky to Futurism to late Lawren Harris abstraction. These may be wilful projections. Like the characters in Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, Scott is a living book keeping alive the memory of modernism. He has created paintings that are elegant, refined, stately and refreshingly new. Is his pallid palette a nod towards the seriousness of the nascence of early 20th-century analytic cubism?

As I adapted to their stony tonalities, many welcomed characteristic Scott gestures, compositional and pictorial qualities were discerned. Perhaps, then, these works are a continuity and an extrapolation.

Copper Slag was organized by the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Swift Current, where it will be presented May 2 to June 21, 2015.

Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery.jpg

Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery

461 Langdon Crescent, Crescent Park, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan S6H 0X6

306-692-4471

please enable javascript to view

Visit Website

Tues to Sun noon - 5 pm and Tues to Thur 7 - 9 pm