Monday, March 29, 2010

Henna Kim


Henna Kim

The microcosm of things have always intrigued me, and that's what is envisioned in the works of this Artist. That close examination of things to a point where they are no longer forms but dots of colour and light. These representations of things as they are bring to mind the later works of Monet. His broken vision of his garden in Giverney.
Henna works in layers and not just with the paint but in the very birth of her process. She starts with these preassembled frames of plywood on a wood frame. Then she laminates it with Korean paper. If it is anything like Japanese Washi paper I know how delicate a surface she is working with, having recently experimented with Washi myself. Of course then the painting begins deftly applied in layers of pure light. This si where I believe Georges Surat did not complete his process as he mathematically arranged dots in juxtaposition to each other to create an illusion. There is no illusion here the dots are layered as one would actually see splashes of light on the surface of the water right at ones feet.
This exhibit was at AWOL at 78 Ossington Ave.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Archlinear - 1

Archilinear - 1
Mixed Media On Paper
24" x 36"

Taking a line through the built space...

Monday, March 8, 2010

Merry - Time
Oil On Routered Plywood
48" x 48"
2010


East coast  turbulent sea...resting Puffin ...

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Francois X Chamberlain



Francois X Chamberlain
Propeller Centre For the Arts

There is something very refreshing about sifting through the work of our senior statesmen. Francois comes to us from La belle Province and born in 1931. The walls of the north gallery are adorned or should I say ladened with his metal constructions. Formed perhaps like collage, I really would prefer to refer to them as rusted paintings. He has indeed built these hanging compositions from found metal junk, but at the same time they feel very painterly. As perhaps Riopelle would have built up layers of paint in formless abstraction, Francois has given abstract form to objects that his keen eye has culled from objects rejected by a society tired of them. It is not a new tool he has employed, as found object as artefact hails back to the early modernists. He has made it fresh and new. Nothing that he has done is at all trite or folksy.
He has taken modernist values and placed them boldly into the palette of the post modernist, a no holds barred non movement. His cubist/minimalist approach to arranging objects on the plane could very well be an early painting by Braque or Picasso. What I find most endearing is the warmth of his palette. He had very generously explained how one of the pieces was about the sinking of Catherine's naval pride the Potemkin . All the while I'm looking at a very carefully arranged composition that drew me into a flattened cubist winter scene, but I felt warmed by the fire of an Artist.