Abstraction in Canada
xArtists: Alison Shields, Bailey Govier, Bradley Harms, Claire Desjardins, Gary Evans, Jeanie Riddle, Jennifer Lefort, John Brown, Robert Linsley and Will Gill.
March 5, 2012- April 20, 2012
My view of Canadian abstraction has always involved a distanced fascination. As a new genre artist, I’m baffled at the resilience of this particular mode of painting in my native land. Why are so many Canadian artists continuing to paint abstractly? This is the single question I ask each of the artists to answer as participants in this online project. I imagine the possible replies to this question to be as unpredictable and infinitely diverse as the distinct approaches of each of these Canadian painters featured in this Little Paper Planes online exhibition.
Even a quick scan will find resident abstract painters in almost every key gallery across Canada. More than lucky charms or safe sales bets, these artists deeply believe in their modus operandi enough to invest in the modern formalism responsible for the birth of the commercial art market as we now know it. In my view, no aesthetic more clearly signals the embrace of art and commerce - if not the power struggles between the pursuit of pure artistic freedom and the contemporary art collector’s desire to exclusively own said liberation product.
What started out as a simple quest - to explore and better understand this propensity towards painterly abstraction - I am now able to see this drive as far more idiosyncratic than first anticipated. The complexity of intentions is startling for paintings of such a categorically homogenized camp. Indubitably, there are conceptual motivations enabling each visual dialect not only to carry the signature accent of its author but also to target a meaningful and anticipated reaction in the viewer. Or has the collective Modernist movement’s clash with Romanticism finally been succeeded? It does look like abstraction, even solely as a decorative philosophy, has finally secured its rightful spot in every middle class domestic abode.
Although I never set out to develop a succinct thesis or culminating statement, one key impression clearly emerged in my discussion with each artist: Abstraction is no longer Abstraction. Instead it is a discarded origin; a cleverly designed inside joke, a digital illusion, a revitalized diary; an architecture for impossible landscapes; a delicate institution; a necessary complexity for rendering complex histories; random labor for cheap tricks and the beautiful mess of spontaneous and smart visual thoughts. A genre so historically fraught with the problems of transforming the subjective into an objective aesthetic experience has reversed itself. Artists are culling the remains of this historic abstract “truth” to represent the most subjective responses. While these replies do speak to abstraction’s legacy, they more rapidly away from this start to form a new language of painterly form. Accordingly, the abstract dialogue is progressing and reinvented - not as another retrograde diatribe in defense of painting – rather as a refreshingly satisfying everyday conversation on themes characteristic and currant to both artist and viewer.
These paintings are not Abstract paintings. I am not the one to suggest a new unnecessary textual assimilation for these works. Possibly an entire list of new categories based on each artist’s surname would work.
I am grateful for all the artists who contributed to this show. They stand apart from one another so distinctly it was a delight to absorb their individual conceptual processes and their resulting painterly signatures. The work has no need to be propped by an external movement. They do not rely on contexts designed through the marketing of edge venues or brand names. Their work stands without need of academic crutch.
This exhibition offers a reconsideration of Canadian abstract painting – yet again. So here we are - once and for all: True patriot love. With glowing hearts. The True North. No more Painter’s Eleven. Refus Les Automatistes. No lavishly illustrated and superbly printed coffee table book. This is “Abstraction”. This is “Canada”. This is Abstraction in Canada.
Otino Corsano is a new genre artist and writer based in Toronto, Canada, yet draws reference from post-conceptual practices in Los Angeles. In his own work, Corsano creates films using alternate approaches and by combining media to produce new meanings. He is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, University of Toronto and received his MFA in New Genres from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 2000. He has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Berlin and is represented by p|m Gallery in Toronto.
http://otinocorsano.blogspot.com/
