Reviews: Sunrise, Sunset at Bradley|Ertaskiran and A Symphony of Untold Depths at Galerie Nicolas Robert
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A Symphony of Untold Depths at Galerie Nicolas Robert features the work of seven artists and Sunrise, Sunset at Bradley|Ertaskiran has work by thirteen. Both group shows are arranged around a broad theme. They pair interestingly since one is largely about projecting a face (or some other body part) onto the world and the other is about a world without faces. The results are a mixture of the sensual and slightly unnerving.
The exhibition features a few of Bednarsky’s anthropomorphic oil and acrylic takes on landscape where geographic sites clearly merge with breasts and bulging nipples, all rendered with soft salt water taffy colours. They recall that peculiar hybrid sub-genre of erotic painting shared by Masson, LeMoine-Fitzgerald, and a handful of Popists. It falls closer to the latter, with a creamy and almost giddy plastic quality.
This pair of works introduce the show’s more extreme aspects, which tend to the violent and sexual while being simultaneously inviting and even humorous. Although there is a morbid streak in a lot of the work, it is a curious one, tempered and even decorative in some instances, like a horror movie with high production design. It is this quality, whatever the intentions behind the individual works themselves might have been, that gives the exhibition its general sense. What results is more atmosphere than anything else. There is enough of an edge to the proceedings to stop it from getting innocuous. Even that which is pretty manages to be so in a fairly polished way, like Robert Zehnder’s Life Pond.
The works by Joani Tremblay and Amanda Baldwin clearly overlap with their illusionary peeling back of successive layers and textures, with the landscape taking on a kind of psychedelic pulsation. This is countered efficaciously by Demarco Mosby’s High Fidelity, featuring a dead bird of prey with a human finger in its beak, all rendered in meaty, heavy oils that give it a thudding quality. The rest of the works in the primary display room vary widely but keep with the general flipping between a brown realism and the more fanciful.
Curatorially, the more disappointing aspect is in the “bunker” area, which is not used to great effect in this instance. Sparsely populated with works, it manages to strike the imbalance between not being full enough or having too much. Likely, it would have been better had it simply contained Santiago Tamayo Soler’s very good sculpture-video piece Recado. With video screens set in an A-frame pattern on a bed of earth, it displays the interior and exterior of a house at night. Rendered digitally and suggestive of video game aesthetics with glowing ambient light, absent figures and a muffled soundtrack, it exudes a great deal of presence as you approach it from the other room, its smell and sound intensifying. One effect of this is that from a distance, the sound seems to be a ghostly inaudible voice but this only becomes more incomprehensible the closer you get. It’s evocative and finds a unique way of using video that actually works in a gallery space much better than video works typically do (at least in Montréal). The rest of the way this space is used detracts from rather than adds to this.
The little corridor you have to crouch through to reach the bunker has pieces by Joseph Tisiga. inertia of spiritual purpose extolled, a trio of works tent canvas featuring that generic icon of Indigenous art, the gas can. But in their multiplied rendering and use of tourist materials, it comes off more as satire of the trope than anything else. Meanwhile, Tisiga’s, the mountains have mouths, crushed down, pound in ground, rode around, unremembered and made silent, an oil marked by a pair of prosthetic teeth, possesses a mixture of tones give it a fanciful nausea that is memorable. It’s a good, condensed, grotesque painting, and having it sit opposite the public toilets is a nice touch.
The text for the Nicolas Robert show attempts to provide it with a cultural situation:
As we navigate an age in which the quest for visibility and connection seems relentless, the concept of anonymity emerges as an enigmatic anomaly. Through the clamour of self-expression and personal branding, this exhibition offers a selection of figurative works that deliberately omit the presence of distinctive facial features. This absence becomes a liberating act, highlighting the importance of context and environment in the formation of identity.
While I’m not convinced that these works go far in suggesting the “importance of context and environment in the formation of identity” (none of their contextual cues suggest much like this at all) they do, as the text goes on to relate, exhibit a “visual paradox” that gives these various anonymous bodies their impressive uneasiness.
Ricardo Passaporte’s large acrylic and aerosol painting of faceless street fighters, Untitled (Fight scene), overshadows everything else in the side room. With thin smears cresting at various points and dissonance added to the rendering of the knuckles, the painting takes on the flattened quality of a decaying photo. Its seemingly randomly captured composition and muted colours don’t take away from the dynamic shifts among its figures. The attitude of the face would have picked up a lot of work in a more conventionally realist painting, but here the paring back to gestural posing and a general ambiguity that becomes more pronounced the more you look at it gives it an unsettled and curious quality.
This contrasts strongly with David Elliott’s shadowboxed sculpture-collages, which look much better in reproduction than in person, where they take on an art project from Michael’s quality with their frozen wistfulness.
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Paintings by Devon Pryce appear in both shows. The presence of his work at Nicolas Robert throws the selections a bit off-kilter since they are not so much effaced as depictions that reduce and intensify the presence of the face as a face. In most of the works by the other artists, it is just a head, and what makes these images effective is the way they reduce or displace the pathos that comes with the face, creating a general strangeness. In Pryce, there’s more of a pathetic sense of estrangement; an entirely different kind of affect. That said, in a painting like Worm, there is a space in the work that undermines this pathos with something else. Leaden with religious connotations and dominated by washed-out colour, off its centre is an over-articulated hand positioned over a set of malformed knees, the strangeness of which causes a slight buckling to the image that counters its too easy attempt at graceful flow.
Not everything in the show works and there are some questionable choices in the way it’s displayed. For instance, the isolation of one small painting of a face peering one-eyed from gapped fingers set at roughly eyeline in the backroom (Pryce’s Head Grows Heavy) does little for it. While the space wouldn’t have balanced any of the larger works properly, this kind of hanging left it too straightforward for its unassuming presence. It either needed to be dropped much lower to demand a different kind of physical interaction.
The stand-out work is a painting by Shoshana Walfish. There are two from her, both heavy yellow with obscured nude body oil on linen paintings. The smaller one (A Promise of Innocence I) doesn’t work; it is clumsy and comes off like a packet of dropped latex gloves. The larger one, Hunting for Morels III, however, is a lush study of contrasts in pink flesh and unfurling yellows lipped by browns. Everything is beautifully articulated with a fascinating blend of sensuality and subtle menace that gives it real power as an image.