Untangling Contemporary Painting

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John Kissick, "burning the houses of cool man, yeah No.5 (hang the DJ)," 2016

oil and acrylic on canvas (courtesy of Katzman Contemporary, Toronto; photo by Toni Hafkenscheid)

Each generation of artists strives to carve out new meaning, to take from the past, make it more relevant and leave a distinct mark on the world. Nowhere is this reinvention more difficult than in painting. So much has been done. What new can be achieved? An ambitious show that includes 70 works by 31 artists, Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until Jan.1, tackles that question by surveying two approaches that have emerged since the 1970s.

One group, corralled under the general heading of “conceptual painting” focuses on the primacy of ideas, or as noted in one of the show’s didactic panels, “art as idea as painting.” The other group, dubbed “performative painting,” is based on work that values actions and materials over ideas. The notion here is that doing and making is what largely defines a painting.

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Stephanie Aitken, "Calypso," 2012

oil on linen (courtesy of the artist)

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Sarah Cale, "Idle Ecstasy," 2016

painting fragments and oil on panel (private collection)

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The conceptual work was assembled by co-curator David MacWilliam, an artist who recently retired from teaching at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University. His selection includes works by the late Gerald Ferguson, an influential artist who taught at what is now NSCAD University in Halifax and helped establish that institution as a world-renowned school for conceptual art. Ferguson’s preoccupation with challenging art-as-object conventions and his use of serial techniques are evident in two of his “sprays” – a series of paintings he started by spraying black enamel through stencils onto a sheet of unprimed, unstretched canvas. Ferguson then cut out sections of the canvas and stretched them to create multiple paintings. As MacWilliam writes in the show’s catalogue: “Feeling he was onto something, over that summer of 1969 Ferguson made approximately 60 'sprays,' a quantity that evokes the ethos of mechanical mass production.” As can be seen in Untitled (Cat. #6), Ferguson occasionally over-sprayed. But MacWilliam notes this was just part of the painting as far as Ferguson was concerned.

Diverging from Ferguson’s quotidian predilections are diligently crafted works by Vancouver-based Jeremy Hof. For the last decade, Hof has made paintings that Williams says “celebrate the materiality and visual density of colour.” Hof applies hundreds of coats of acrylic paint over many years, then grinds and sands away sections to reveal an array of colours that glow and move, almost like an optical illusion. The shapes he carves out refer to forms used by early abstract painters such as targets and lozenges. His works are an interesting exploration of the colour spectrum and how colours react to each other. “What these works have in common with their modernist predecessors is a unified bas-relief surface, which allows for these new combinations of colours to live next to each other,” says MacWilliam.

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Jeremy Hof, "Fluorescent Ring on Purple," 2014

acrylic on panel (collection of Keith Ebert; photo by Toni Hafkenscheid)

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Francine Savard, "Les Couleurs de Cézanne dans les mots de Rilke 36/100 – Essai," 1998

vinylic and acrylic paints on canvas, mounted on high-density fibreboard and framed book (collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; photo by Richard-Max Tremblay)

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The show includes several monochromes, such as Vancouver-based Arabella Campbell’s witty, all-white Wall paintings, which are based on her memories of particular shades of white on different gallery walls. Her work demonstrates there is no single white.

The “performative” paintings, selected by the gallery’s senior curator, Bruce Grenville, not surprisingly, have a palpable physicality. None more than Montreal-based John Heward’s Abstractions, 1990-2017, which consists of large pieces of canvas, stained and marked with occasional flashes of red, yellow or blue. These raw-edged pieces are joined with small clamps and hung from ceiling and wall, or at times draped on the floor. Heward installs each exhibition of Abstractions differently, speaking to his exploration of form’s resistance to identification and the impermanence of matter. “There is, in this work, a commitment to the performative – in the making of the work, in its installation and its viewing,” Grenville writes in his catalogue essay. “Meaning comes to and from Heward’s painting through the act of its performance.”

A couple of performative works act as outright installations. Montreal’s Jeanie Riddle has created an installation that includes colourful canvases folded neatly on a chair against a backdrop of brilliant yellow and a shelf of colourful artifacts. And Jessica Groome, who is based in Berlin, but has roots in Vancouver and Toronto, occupies a large gallery with her paintings, drawings and sculpture. From tabletop “flags” to painted paper circles with cut out curvy lines, as well as a few conventional canvases, her Naming the thing that disappears refers to Henri Matisse’s cutouts and his reliance on the studio as a place for transformation. Groome made the works in her Berlin studio specifically for this exhibition, a further nod to the significance of studio work.

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Jeanie Riddle, "Category → 1979" (detail, from the installation "In A Time of Deep Nostalgia)," 2017

metal, wood, adhesive, latex paint and acrylic on canvas, (courtesy of the artist; photo by Guy L'Heureux)

All in all, Entangled is proof that painting is alive and continues to evolve. Artists haven’t yet painted themselves into a dead end. After seeing this show, it’s hard to believe they ever will.