Reviews: Chris Kline's La Manche at Nicolas Robert and Jean-Sébastien Denis' Aberrations 2 at Galerie d'Outremont

 

In the space at the back of Galerie Nicolas Robert is a series of works by Chris Kline. Untitled and unnumbered, they fall under the general exhibition title, La Manche. Central to the works is their history as a medium that indexes the shifts in his working space.

According to the framing statement:

Nearly ten years ago Chris Kline began a process of reconfiguring his paintings. By deposing finished canvases from their stretchers, interposing them between the walls and floor in his studio, interleaving them between sheets of glass, plywood, raw canvas, and layers of gesso, an image appeared in a matrix of indirect ‘brush-strokes’: traces of the geometries of the absented stretcher-frame; the factures of cut, stretched, primed, painted cloth; and the surfaces of concrete and gypsum-board. Reframed and repositioned inside the expanded perimeters of new supports, this image was submerged under applications of paint; the palimpsest of second-hand brush-work dissolved. Indications of margins, borders, or horizon which remained were overcast in an environment of transparent colour.

A whole performance/process line is highlighted here and linked to a rhetoric of deposition and transformation that gives the work a theatrical (perhaps even slightly religious) backing. The ghostly indexes of the shifts in the paintings’ history as the props in this drama are reminiscent of proto-photographic processes, here capturing the emergence and freezing of an image as the mark made by studio configuration.

Following this stage of the studio as an incidental and unconscious image producer, the resulting image is subjected to a theatricalization of production in an overtly minimal way that calls attention to itself as a gesture. The paint application is nearly all long lines with brushwork/application evident. The over-processing of the initial traces through the painting only highlights the obscurity of the quality that they give to the objects. Strokes tend to run horizontally, keeping everything flat and pinned to the wall. Painting over is a method of capture and retention, of highlighting rather than covering over, that slows their decay. The painting over of them ironically codes the re-presentation of this process. Flat, one-to-one hanging keeps the works at the height of the average viewer, suggesting the silhouette aspect that ties it back to proto-photography. 

Spanning across the space, the colour in the paintings runs from black to white as extremes to set the other tones against. They are not set out entirely along a linear gradation of the spectrum. Blues are set against lighter purples and blacks are mostly lines while a brown dominates several pieces. Under-painting and drawn lines can be seen exposed on the edge of one. Another contains drops of paint that pooled and flattened at its edge. This may be the most interesting and subtle aspect of the process element of the works, one which seems almost harsh in the context.

The light blue/white work has the most worked-up surface and seems to index itself the least to the process. Set beside it, the silvery white work bifurcated just reads as duochrome. In general, the works are not hard enough to be comic in the satiric register of support-surface painting and seem more wistful than that, more at a peace with general nostalgia and even sentimentalization rather than a depositioning of the grander narratives of the ambitions of painting. 

If Kline’s exhibition theatricalized the production of the image using the familiar language of monochromes, something similar happens in Aberrations by Jean-Sébastien Denis at Galerie d’Outremont. An earlier iteration of this tendency is his work was shown in Verdun last year and another at Simon Blais (which I saw) the year before that. Both of these seem to have developed to some degree from a series of mixed media works made on mylar, something which stressed the peculiar mix of the gauzily transparent and the flat and shiny.   

The gallery text informs us that:

Jean-Sébastien Denis is fascinated by the experience of colour the links between painting, photography and the digital world. His work reveals painting’s ability to play between fiction and reality, between what we know and what is and that which is beyond our control. [np] Colour presents itself both as seductive and uncomfortable. The limits of painting are often called into question. Space feeds on games of perception and make-believe that engage the whole body in the experience of the work, in the experience of painting.

The pieces work through the overlapping of different textures and patterns. In general, a sense of smoothness comes off as the dominant texture. Most of the painting that was clearly rendered in taped-off sections has a gritty texture within it to play against this. There is a range from the hard to soft in terms of paint application, relief and illusion of depth, that echoes the twisting of curves that pull the works together across the display space. Superficially, it looks like mural art or the display art for a commercial showroom. If Kline was theatricalizing production, what is theatricalized by Denis is both this and something more along the lines of reception.

The smoothness is not total. Some of the cut-outs that have been superimposed are noticeably crudely gouged but most of this handicraft quality is avoided by the attempt to make everything seem like a printout. Intentional or not, some of the black shapes that have been pasted to one wall are beginning to curl off and cast some shadow in the flatly lit space. This is one subtle way the tactility of the work tends to complicate its superficial quality as a representation of digital imagery. Even if this is accidental, it is more successful than the polychromatic strokes of paint that just come off as garish gestures at performative painting, something that makes clear the hodgepodge of visual strategies but does not do much with bumping them into each other.

Although there is the implied sense that there should be flow from one work to the next, something suggested by the twisting directional line on the floor, the pieces themselves break up in terms of quality. Pieces 8 and 11 likely work the best and fairly self-sufficiently. Once this is recognized, the whole exhibition feels a bit incohesive and the jarring aspects of the works become more pronounced.

Photos do not really do justice to how visually grating the combination of patterns is in person and to how much gradual disorientation seems to be a basic function of the work as a whole. Perhaps this is where the “immersive” aspect of the work comes in. This is not just a matter of entering the showroom of the art but in a sense of being immersed in its production, like you have been shrunk down to watch it come off the production line as a glistening object, suspended against an aura of colour gradients and graphic gestures. There is something a bit nauseating about them, which seems intentional. This goes with the generally gaudy, blown-up sense of graphic nostalgia/anachronism that the show possesses.