Reviews: Rick Leong at Bradley/Ertaskiran | Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich at Patel/Brown | Syrine Daigneault at Galerie Popop
Three different shows of mostly painting this week. One of these was quite good while the others were not to widely varying degrees. They are all settled in vague mythological spaces. Both Leong and Jaouich’s shows are afflicted with a hysterical form of reactionary humanism while Daigneault’s is an admirably concise rendering of pessimistic comedy.
Rick Leong’s Long Time No See at Bradley|Ertaskiran
Rick Leong’s show is described in the gallery’s material this way:
This new series of landscapes, deeply rooted in the Canadian West Coast archipelago landscapes on the brink of irrevocable change, continues Leong’s long-standing preoccupation with depicting the interconnectedness of all living things. […] Here, and typical of Leong’s larger practice, is a sense of both halted and passing time, in which nature’s phenomenological changes are fossilized into a single scene. Leong captures quiet, drawn-out moments in hazy monotones: tree branches stretching and swaying in the wind, a tide receding back across its shores, a deer halting at an unexpected sound. We too hold our breath, as if an exhale would alter the scene before us. […] Yet despite the calm and tranquility inherent to Leong’s landscapes, his use of acidic hues allude to the alarming reality of our environmental moment. In turn, Leong’s utopian imaginings reflect both the positive and realistic state of our current climate reality, urging us to consider the potential for harmony in our natural world.
His paintings have the quality of a polished-up interwar Canadian modernism filtered through a level of unfortunate greeting card cuteness (such as his slightly diaphanous big-eyed deer), familiar neon vaporwave tones that are more comforting than “alarming,” and balanced by a little Japonisme (in the generic form of the wave) that makes them charming and attractive in a wallpaper way at their best. The juxtaposition of colours is striking and demonstrative. Even the paintings dominated by blue possess a kind of warmth and familiarity akin to the bright-hued nearly psychedelic images primarily of sky. They are “wild” images in a distinctly collaged way, a painterly equivalent of flower arranging.
Taken in full sweep, there is something of an expressive drive toward full abstraction which is brought down, and in varying ways neutralized, by the bramble patch of curves and flattened shapes that cloud up the compositions. There is a cartooning of drama at play through this implosion of action that settles into a burble of moderate corniness. The use of the road sign to Fairy Creek in one painting is trite in this overdrive to fantasy given that the work is already so severely removed from reality. The “alarming reality of our environmental moment” that the works are framed by is to give his aversion to “nature” and replacement of it with a fantasy gravitas but it trivializes their power as paintings.
Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich’s Living Lineages at Patel|Brown
Patel|Brown is continuing to prove itself as one of the most inconsistent galleries in the city, at least in terms of quality. For Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich’s show of works, its framing asserts they come from the painter's piecing together “fragments of her lineage—from oral histories, a constructed genealogy, and surviving personal materials shared with her by kin during her search for connecting threads [wherein] Muriel’s body completes the sentences her words cannot [so her ] paintings are a vehicle for the unspoken, a vessel for connection and reclamation.” This is done through the use of what suggests Ancient Egyptian iconography for a set of crude soft-hued paintings strung along the walls.
The paintings themselves are barely mediocre and appear to be discarded props from the set of a lousy 50s Mummy B movie. A total mockery of this appropriated iconography seems to be in effect but also appears to have been entirely unintended for this rather goofy racial fantasy. Although they are almost funny as bad paintings, this meagre quality is milked dry by being enframed by one of the most ludicrous and exploitative exhibition essays I have read lately, and which reads as an extreme form of overcompensation for work that is so underwhelming, at least if one regards all of it not as a convoluted joke.
The problem isn’t that this is all fairly sleazy trauma porn sublimated into kitsch mystification because these things can be exploited to create worthwhile art. The dual aspects of text by Merray Gerges and the paintings combine to create something that is interesting because it’s so hideous, like cartoon doodlings of concentration camp tortures printed on tampons, but too sanctimonious or incompetent to embrace this, and so it just sits there like an asset stripped stillbirth in a badly designed hospital.
Syrine Daigneault’s Domaines de la volonté at Galerie Popop
Galerie Popop is no less inconsistent in its shows but given that it is run by rental rather than having gallerists, this is understandable and easily excusable. This time around, it’s very good with a suite of paintings from Syrine Daigneault.
It includes a series of paintings showcasing a variety of rendering techniques and genres of imagery. There is also a soft sculpture and a painted rug. In terms of imagery, it combines portraiture with caricatured types, highly realistic depictions of objects (such as apples), and archetyping depictions of idealized forms. The breadth of these two directions occasionally settles in fine detailing but is usually broader, more symbolic. As a full suite of imagery, it doesn’t entirely work. While relying on everything from kitsch figures to holy ones, genital iconography, and even a few splashes of textile design, it does create an overall flattening of the sphere of representation, suggesting its contingent, ephemeral, and ultimately illusory quality.
It is odd to see something framed so heavily in relation to Schopenhauer (as the accompanying text does), especially a set of representational paintings, and even odder given that they tend to have distinctly erotic qualities. While the variety can be theoretically justified in Schopenhauerian terms, and the exhibition is one of the more genuinely thoughtful uses of philosophy I have seen lately, it is still overshadowed by three works which symbolically condense its themes pretty adequately. The paintings Ce qui me recouvre and Autoportrait en costume traditionnel both present an "alter ego puppet mimicking human postures bordering on the grotesque," in the one case isolated in a softly coloured full body portrait and in the other through a set of motifs patterned out like an elaborate textile or wallpaper. Thematically, the key piece in the whole thing ends up being the costume itself, which suggests a deflated sex doll rendered as a soft sculpture that sits in a puddle on the floor.