Ladies and gentlemen, bienvenue.   We are the Artfag.

And we have tried something new, and in our inestimable opinion, quite ambitious with this latest issuance of our cahier. Instead of the usual (but always thrilling) formula of a series of brief reviews, we have decided to present an essay: On Painting and Its Discontents. Why, you may ask, Painting, and why now?

Well, darlings, we have had many a-conversation recently that has reminded us of many a-conversation past. The reoccurrence of this conversation has dovetailed almost too neatly with a certain number of shows we've seen recently. We spotted a theme; thus, this essay.   In the interest of space (and our meager operating budget), we have not included every show which has prompted our musings, only the ones that best illustrate our points; apologies to those shows, and those artists, for having to carry the pendulous weight of our pontifications on their own slender shoulders.

We hope you enjoy; we endeavour to please.

What we like: pashminas, for some reason. All of a sudden, they call to us like fashion sirens; we have been approaching cautiously, lest we crash on the rock of a faux-pas.

How we are: we can't complain too strenuously, although that's never really stopped us before.

What we don't like: indecisive autumn weather wreaking havoc with our ability to layer.

ON PAINTING AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Discussed in this essay:

CLINT ROENISCH GALLERY

Kent Dorn, Memoir

September 9 - October 7, 2006

MOCCA

Royal Bank of Canada Canadian Painting Competition

September 9 - 24, 2006

Ladies and gentlemen, painting is in. Or, at the very least, painting is enjoying a brief respite between periods of being dead.  

Painting, of all artistic media, seems particularly susceptible to this kind of style-based animus. It's not merely a matter of age; sculpture, after all, has been around just as long, although its transformation into installation has kept it in the realm of the current. Perhaps that's the crux of it; let's call it the Madonna effect: the rejuvenating powers of perpetual transformation. Much as painting, and painters, try to do something novel and transformative (oddly shaped canvasses! Gluing a bunch of shit onto the painting!), it almost always carries the decidedly uncomfortable reek of a transparent trend-grab. Like the prototypical out-of-date parent refusing to age gracefully, attempting to achieve cachet by mangling youth slang, nothing is so painful to watch as someone (or something) arduously trying to be what they aren't.

Case in point: one Mr. Kent Dorn's recent show, "Memoir," at the Clint Roenisch gallery. Mr. Dorn is a young painter from Texas whose works involve otherwise banal scenes (a hiking trip, buddies hangin' on a sofa, candles on a dinner table) painted on canvas, and covered by layer upon layer with, for want of a more florid descriptor, junk: bits of paper and push-pins, painted over in what we can only imagine must be a loose attempt at integrating this debris into the picture plane.

The resultant topography of this glorified craft project throws everything out-of-joint: figures in the background jut out miles in front of the immediate foreground; otherwise unnecessary details are, quite literally, thrown into high relief. Now, this reversal of pictorial logic might be interesting were it not for the fact that it's so poorly executed. Underneath all of that scrap lie the hints of some potentially interesting painting: a swath of brilliant colour here, a seductive swish of a brush there. Most unfortunately, each instance of such a delightful passage is promptly smothered by the contents of Mr. Dorn's recycling bin. We're terribly sure there's some conceptually highfalutin' reason for this dog-pile, but whatever it is, it doesn't quite translate. Instead, it merely looks like what it is: a painting obscured by heaps of detritus. Consequently, Mr. Dorn comes across as yet another out-of-date parent; someone who's listened a little too intently to squabbling over painting's supposed irrelevance, and is trying desperately to inject some novelty into the mire of self-doubt that is his craft.  

Of course, this quibbling over relevance is a purely theoretical matter; after all, the pounding painting has bravely endured over the years has been played out purely on the battlefield of theory (painting has always been, and still is, the most collectible of media). Let us recall the terrible lows of the last century, that we might relish the relief that this renewed contemporary affection affords. The Marxists were, for our money, the first to take a swing. They didn't really care much for art in general, what with it being a profession of the leisure classes and a tool of the bourgeoisie. But painting in particular, having allied itself quite inextricably with the propagandistic exercise of power (viz. Napoleon et. al.) bore the brunt of leftist distaste, which would last for the better part of the rest of the century. Clement Greenberg wanted to purify it to its barest essence (strange talk from a Jew, especially one who came of age in the forties), second-wave feminists saw it as yet another suffocating excrescence from the towering phallus of masculinity, and Arthur Danto, in surely the most extravagant art-theoretical case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, proclaimed its death (along with the death of art in general) in the mid-60's. This is to say nothing of the suspicions raised by the onset of photography, which were only exacerbated by video coming into its own. The funereal yammering continued well into the 1980's, and has only fairly recently abated, thanks in large part to the shopping habits of one Mr. Charles Saatchi. A few blockbuster shows later, and the scribblers (most noted among them Mr. Barry Schwabsky) take notice. And, lo and behold, painting is in again.

All this theoretical grand-guignol over the au-courant significance of painting, is of course, viciously ironic. The hand-wringing on behalf of contemporaneity is, in point of fact, a throwback, a half-reheated leftover of High Modernism. At its core, this fretting boils down to the exact same complaint of Mr. Greenberg; for whatever reason, and despite the pluralism, the shattering of Received Truths, the looping self-referentiality promised by Postmodernism (whose existence, ladies and gentlemen, we highly doubt) we still expect novelty and progress of our art, and painting, so the logic went, has been around so long it has nowhere else to go. It is thus that the morbid artistic forecasters resemble nothing so much as eager virgins on a first date: perpetually premature.

And what of the painters? Well, ladies and gentlemen, let us put it this way: thanks to this nigh-institutionalized suspicion of their craft, every painter (or at least the intelligent ones) of our acquaintance has endured some kind of crisis at some point in their career (poor Mr. Dorn looks to be smack dab in the middle of his). This crisis strikes at different times, and its main thrust differs from person to person, but suffice it to say that what they all share in common is the enduring of painfully exhausting debates on Art and Its Necessity. The committed painters muscle through, and stay committed; the rest start gluing shit to their canvasses.

And Canadian painters? Utter a prayer for these poor unfortunates, marginal among the marginalized. We heard a delightful bit of gossip wherein Mr. Peter Doig was said to have remarked that Canada is the worst place to start a career as an artist. Possibly an overstatement (we can't imagine that New Zealand has it any easier), but we see what he was getting at. Consider, ladies and gentlemen, the fact that the new vanguard of contemporary painting has sprung almost exclusively from Europe, a place whose geographical intimacy facilitates swift cross-country art-appreciating (and, more importantly, art-shopping) jaunts; where people travel fast, so does news. As a result of this cross-national intimacy, reputations boom and flourish (viz. the Leipzig "school"). Such a thing is impossible in the True North Strong and Free, whose major cosmopolitan centres are either separated by yawning gulfs of prairie, or are cash-poor and running on recycled government money (désolé, mes amis Montréalais, but it's true; your artist-run centres are the stuff of legend, and your commercial galleries, while multiplying slowly, are still an endangered species).

Nothing terribly tangible can be done to remedy this, but it's nice to know that someone is trying, or at the very least, paying attention; the annual Royal Bank of Canada Canadian Painting competition culls together the "best" (at least, according to the year's ever-changing jury) of Canada's young painting talent, from sea to shining sea. The RBC competition has a bit of a musty, stodgy reputation about it, but nevertheless, it's always instructive to have a gander at what the kids are doing these days.

Canadian painting used to have a reputation for being reliably 30 years (at least) behind the times. When our American and European confrères were Cubistically running amok with the picture plains, our local boys and girls (the ones who hadn't amscrayed to Europe, at least) were still busily churning out rustic pastorals chronicling the arboreal splendor of the Canadian Shield (thank heaven for the advent of abstraction, otherwise we'd have never caught up). One quick glance around the expanse of MOCCA reveals that now, quite the opposite is true. The young Canadian vanguard is Paying Attention to Painting Now (we are willing to bet ready money that, on each of their library shelves, a dog-eared copy of Vitamin P lies, spine-cracked and oil-stained with constant reference). Not only are they Paying Attention, but, judging from the show, they are doing so to an absurd degree. We noted, whilst perambulating the circumference of the gallery, that for the most part, the RBC competition reads like a digest of Painting Now; much recycling, precious little originality.

We even noticed that three mid-crisis painters managed to sneak in to this little party: Dax Morrison, Abbas Akhavan, and Luce Meunier. Dax Morrison, in a fit of cleverness, decided to mimic a gallery wall, and so painted a flat, white surface. His process, of course, is painstaking, researching (O the research!) paint samples from galleries nationwide, and quite frankly ladies and gentlemen, we are so bored that we cannot be bothered to finish the sentence. Mr. Morrison: there is no shortage of white walls in this world. Your contribution is no more or less clever than any other white wall. And institutional critiques might be fine in the hermetic confines of a graduate program, but they ring exceptionally hollow when displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, in a contest sponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada.

Abbas Akhavan has no use for paint altogether. Instead, he has meticulously unraveled strings off of his bare linen so as to form a geometric grid pattern within the cloth itself. Call us a conservative traditionalist, but we fail to understand how exactly a canvas with no paint on it managed to be a semi-finalist in a painting competition. Mr. Akhavan: get over it. This fails as an exercise in conceptual grandeur. This kind of cold conceptual gesture can only really be done to any effect once, and it's already been done; its attempt at minimalist avant-gardism is as dated and dead as the minimalist avant-garde. At best, this kind of intellectual masturbation can be seen as a nostalgic paean to an outmoded artistic conceit, and thus is about as au-courant as a painting of a sailboat.

Ms Meunier distrusts brushes, for whatever reasons, and instead opts for found objects: bottles and rubber seals on raw linen. This is, of course, yet another conceptual reach, a desperate attempt to force novelty. Ms Meunier: one of the joys of brushes is their remarkable mark-making promiscuity. And even if one decides to use other means, one should at least attempt to explore this other's range, to achieve some kind of alchemical otherness, or at the very least, visual interest and depth. Your entry rather looks like the floor, the morning after a drunken finger-painting party. One should always strive to transcend one's materials, rather than be imprisoned by them.

Prior to the announcement of the winner, we were taking bets: either Kim Dorland or Dil Hildebrand (the winner, of course, turned out to be Mr. Hildebrand). These two managed to separate themselves from the rabble as the only ones possessed of any kind of originality of vision, any ease with their own skills and practices, well-informed and contemporary without resorting to fan-boy copy-catting.   The rest have spent a little too much time gazing at Vitamin P .   Much of the gallery was a who's-who and what's-what of styles and painters: the Neo Rausch knock-off, the Peter Doig knock-off, the Marlene Dumas knock-off, the slick photorealist, the devoutly ironic faux-naïf, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Mr. Dorland's work (and we have seen quite a lot of it, at this point, what with his successes at the Scope fairs, and the Angell gallery pushing him like heroin) is a riot of frantic, stabbing brushwork and saturated candy-colours. His chief area of interest seems to be in a kind of pubescent violence. Stare at the furiously brusque marks long enough, and an image emerges from the chromatic frenzy; his RBC entry consists of forest-scene with a brawling melee of figures in the mid-background, and a lone onlooker smoking laconically in the foreground. There is a terrible violence in this picture, whose achievement rests more on the harsh clashes of a hellish red ground against a pile of acid-green stabs of paint than the schematic delineation of the picture's narrative. What we find most interesting in Mr. Dorland's oeuvre is his peculiar combination of visual languages: the puerile cartoon simplicity of his figures, drawn as collection of lines and sticks, and their brutal, almost ferocious translation onto the canvas as marks. There are certain traits that we believe Mr. Dorland to be relying too heavily upon - great heaping mounds of paint can make a dangerously cheap shorthand for genuine emotion and affect - but nevertheless, he is clearly a natural painter, and his rising art-scene stock aside, is quite clearly On To Something.

We have to shame-facedly confess prior ignorance of Mr. Hildebrand's work. For the similarly uninitiated, his oeuvre consists in the construction of elaborate spatial illusions, usually involving landscapes, and making heavy reference to the banal processes of studio painting. This is more than tricksy trompe-l'oeuil. Rather, Mr. Hildebrand, with the grace of Fred Astaire, assembles contradictory visual perspectives, vistas (an idyllic pastoral landscape versus a dilapidated studio), and marks (great tectonic swaths of paint applied with a palette knife versus the polished smoothness of brushwork) and has them all sit in the same picture plain. The outcome is phenomenal, the result of impeccable taste and remarkable restraint: each element is pushed, worked, and left alone just so, and is left in perfect stasis. There is no attempt at all-over pictorial unification, and yet no one element is too jarring or domineering. Likewise, there is no attempt at compositional deconstruction or deliberate clashing; each element has its precise, harmonic place.

What makes Mr. Dorland's and Mr. Hildebrand's work so refreshing, and such a cause for celebration, is that, like their confreres who are the tireless toilers behind painting's current popularity surge, there is not only a confidence in what painting can do, not only a willingness to wrestle with its particular inexhaustible struggles, but a sheer palpable joy in the process. It is precisely this joy, this freedom from fashionable crisis, which ensures the ongoing proliferation of painting, and in turn ensures the joy in its consumption.