Sunday, October 24, 2010

Odilon Redon. Les Yeux Clos. 1890.


Wilhelm Sasnal. Untitled. 2008.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Panopticon



Luc Tuymans. Our New Quarters.



Jules DeBalincourt. If You See Something Say Something.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

m.a.p.s.

Jasper Johns. Map. 1961.


Jules DeBalincourt. World Studies II. 2005.


Jules DeBalincourt. World Studies III. 2005.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Friday, December 18, 2009

False Mountain Museum Memories

Jules DeBalincourt. Internal Renovations. 2006.


Clare Grill. Mountain Museum. 2008.




Ricky Allman. False Memories. 2008


Thomas Hirschorn. Non-Lieux. (photo)

The Green Line

Hernan Bas. Untitled (Green Line). 2005



Matisse. La Raie Verte (The Green Line) or Mme Matisse



Kaye Donachie. I fear this hidden motion. 2007



Graham Durward. Yellow. 2007.



Hernan Bas. The Blue Line. 2005-6

Monday, December 7, 2009


Jaclyn Shoub. Near Airport #2. 1997
Oil and Toner on Mylar Mounted on Masonite.


Jaclyn Shoub. Monochromatic #2. 2006


Jaclyn Shoub. Untitled. 2001.

Among my favourite contemporary Canadian painters, Jaclyn Shoub's pale, altered photocopies are printed onto transparent mylar and fixed atop swipey, drippy monochromatic oil paintings. The similarity to Turner is unmistakable. However they remain non derivative. She lacks Turner's ambition, and the paintings serve as subtle atmospheric notations of that rarefied passivity one feels waiting in airports or in transit. A kind of suspension of the ordinary laws of humdrum interaction with reality. But is the technique -- photographic decals as counterpoint to abstraction -- too easy?

There are artists from the old world, whose work we encounter so often in print that it's easy to take their greatness for granted. Leafing through an old pile of New Yorker's I read what is, to my mid one of the most accurate and thought-provoking critiques of the paintings of JMW Turner.

...Unlike John Constable, his quieter, more profound peer, Turner conveys only irritable ambition. We must never forget to admire him. This tires. Turner’s style is synthetic, leaning on picturesque convention (never more so than when most nearly abstract) while brazening arbitrary audacities. He overlays splooshes of paint with passages of tidy drawing like bathtub decals.
J.M.W. Turner. Rain, Steam and Speed. 1844.