Last week we looked at two shows that were prop-heavy. Whether painting or multi-media installation, the result was a stress on objectification that bypassed their literary inspiration. They ended up concentrating on props that were not reducible to theatricality. If anything, they foregrounded a kind of anti-theatricality, or a theatre in the absence of drama, a theatre of properties rather than performances. This week, we look at two shows where the use of the medium would also seem to suggest a prop quality, like steam-rolled dioramas. They also have something more closely approximating the documentary, and, notably, not the kind of documentary “neoliberal” aesthetic that tends to crop up.
In these two shows, there is a stress, both thematic and formal, on localization and the sense in which the intensive quality of an aspect can be delineated by divergent rendering. They both frequently employ visual strategies that suggest cloisonné and are usefully seen as types of relief painting. Although they share some of the stylistic tendencies commonly associated with art brut, they also share something with the general move toward painting in relief that followed in the wake of colour field painting and the desire to shift away not only from illusionism but toward a treatment of the painting as an object. The resurgence of relief painting in the 1960s and 70s stressed this, just as it made evident how readily painting can blur into sculpture.
Something different is happening here though. For rather than diminishing the illusionism, commonly associated with painting and its sense of being a window, or, in a complementary fashion, of stressing the flatness of the canvas and its conventionality, they enthusiastically exploit these aspects as means for creating illusions in an exhibitionistic way. Relief is a constructive device for making this clear.
At galerie COA are a series of works by Québec City’s Raphaël Guillemette under the title Bout de branche. They straddle interior and exterior scenes, blurring them in terms of composition and content. The figures within them, whether animal or human, are almost inevitably decapitated (perhaps a reference to the Acephalic). Eyes and limbs float to the edges of some of them. Chairs recur as a common figure, usually providing a point of reference (as well as thematizing the transformation of wood) that the rest of the image works to complicate. Overall, there is a filmy, lived-in quality to them, accentuated by the consistent use of earthy tones.
In their combination of highly varied textures in shifting density and recurrent motifs (but not patterns), they tend to evoke decayed wallpapered interiors at times; less still lives than the impression that it was removed and sewn together. At other times, it verges closer to folk art, especially when relying on the more clearly figurative bodily elements.
This “haunted” thematic works well with how the objects in the works are rendered in collage, spray paint and acrylics on wood and canvas. They never seem whole but pieced together from fractures of memory that accentuate their details differently. Each element of a building is given a distinct nuance and surface dimension, cast not only in a different light but with a unique tactile quality. Here there is also a basically enclosed sense to all of the objects. But it’s more than that. They each seem to function within their own tangible space, their divorce from a world of smooth transitions and depth stressing the distinct articulation of elements.
The works stress their flatness to accentuate their illusionism, which has the function of a technical demonstration. Each element, whether wall, tree or sky, is rendered as though it comes from a different visual-tactile logic, a strategy that complicates their status as “knowledge” of a concrete phenomenon. Presumably, this is a means to thematize divergent interpretations over the course of history.
