Oil Paintings Market News

VANCOUVER – Elements, at the Equinox, is a show about painting about painting, by Ben Reeves. Unlike most self-referent practice, it’s not off-puttingly self-conscious or clever, it’s as virtuosic as it is witty. You haven’t seen anything like it before.

In every one of the 13 pieces, some of them quite large, your view of the subject is obscured by what looks like a heavy blizzard of snow. Flakes – they can grow to more like blobs – obscure the details behind them. Some of them are huge and look more like cream pies, big fat globs of paint – this is super-impasto – and are surely a record in the density of paint as applied to a canvas.

There’s something Brechtian about this deliberate game of obfuscation, a call to attention about the falsity of a technique. It’s related to the distancing effect that Bertolt Brecht used to draw us closer to truth by showing us the artifice that he could employ in erecting a facade against it, by giving the game away early. Paradoxically it makes the truth more real.

Reeves’s approach, ironically, is to get to an almost sub-atomic level in his argument about what is real and what is not, which is part of the pleasure of this show. There were times when I almost laughed out loud at the hugeness of those globs of paint. Once, I touched one of them, though I shouldn’t have. It was soft and gave slightly, then poofed back. It hadn’t dried yet and God knows when it would.

Yet the gestures are painterly. Brushstrokes are clearly evident in those gray cream pies that hide the face of the smoker, for example, or blot out our view of the car accident that has happened in the snowstorm, with police all around. Yet the subjects are ordinary. A girl walks by in a blizzard and we can hardly see her for the flurry. Yet take away that flurry and what would you have? Nothing really. The paintings are immensely satisfying for that very snowstorm. And what painter would do a detail, a separate close-up, of something that he’d already painted (there are two of these). These may be the funniest of all.

The banality of his subjects shouldn’t distract you from the seriousness of the debate: this is a very “Canadian” show, and not just because Reeves is from North Vancouver, studied at UBC, taught in Ontario and is now an instructor at Emily Carr. He’s a provocateur and a very smart one.

I think my favourite work of all is the near-white-out conditions of a road scene that hangs in gallery-owner Andy Sylvester’s office (because the bottom was slightly injured during installation). This is a white rapture. Or maybe it’s the one of tire skid marks in a field of “snow” – paint that has been applied literally as deeply, or shallowly, as a real skiff of precipitation. This too is a perfect abstraction of patterns that traffic across your vision in curving vectors. (The Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery have already bought some of the works.)

Time is the last element of Elements. Enough of it and the drying blobs of paint will crack with all the authenticity of a renaissance painting. Part of the delight of this show is the implication that that precious object you may have on the wall behind the couch, that idyllic pastoral scene, that portrait that so perfectly matches the colors of the decor – it too may be a lie. This is a very bold, clear show about limited visibility.

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Source: The Vancouver Sun

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A serious show about painting, but light-heartedly serious ©2010 Oil Paintings Market News