Carol Wainio

I have a soft spot for paint; I can’t rationalize why that is, exactly. Artists of a certain generation, myself included, know that we can take the practice apart on a number of levels, including the heroic gesture, the rarified object and the practice’s intrinsic relationship to the market, but all that aside, painting somehow remains the measure, even for an artist who has never raised a brush to canvas. It’s an unwavering fact that the death of painting is always with us, and, on the other hand, it’s always on the comeback. All this said, the one thing I envy most about painters is that every day, they know who they are—they are painters. Carol Wainio strikes me as just such an artist. I first saw her work in the early ’80s when she was in the MFA program at Concordia University and I was doing a BFA. We were both studying with the eminent Guido Molinari.

Wainio straddles the line between abstraction and representation, playing with the possibilities inherent in painting pictures or painting paint. It’s almost as if by not committing to one or the other, she can be left to be a dabbler, teasing and testing the validity of both. Looking at a Wainio painting is like staring into the rippling surface of a pool of water. Her marks shimmer with possibilities as images and abstract forms come into focus, then disappear in fragmented, rainbow brush strokes. This particular method of loading the brush is a signature of sorts, something that seems to have always been in her work. I think of it as a micro echo of Molinari’s striped paintings, each stroke an abstract painting unto itself.

Her new paintings, like earlier works, are built surfaces where pictorial elements are constructed out of painterly marks with linear illustrative images emerging out of the ripples. Wainio’s paintings are literary, referencing children’s fairytales, populated with playful birds, rabbits and the outline of open books. Without knowing her exact points of reference, I’m often lost as to what’s being shown to me, but sense there is a story somewhere in the painting, lurking behind the earthy tones.

Encountering Carol Wainio’s work over the last 20 years has led me to ask, what if the artist eliminated representational imagery? In these dichotomous surfaces, there isn’t a tension so much as an obfuscation. We look at them in a state of confusion. Wainio makes great painterly surfaces that, on their own, carry the work. What if she painted paint? Some of the work from the early ’90s is more tenuous, almost tipping into the abstract, but never quite; always hiding somewhere is a smudgy figure and reference to a landscape. We live in an image-saturated world. Do we need more pictures? Judging by the success of photography in today’s art market, there is obviously a desire for the literal image. But painting can do something else—it can be paint.

I’m not going to suggest that I can direct another artist’s work, but I find that at this point in Carol Wainio’s career, occupying the middle may not be the best strategy. These new paintings are larger than I’ve seen before, getting to the point where they can fill our entire field of vision. I want to see only the paint. I want to step into them and let my body be that of the figure in the work. It’s a personal thing, because I don’t think I really care about the images in her work. I enjoy the way she paints. But if an image is absolutely necessary for her to make a painting, then I accept that it must stay. I wouldn’t want to stop seeing Wainio’s work. Her works consistently have an agitated sense of urgency about them. They are shimmering into the world where they must be.

I criticize cautiously because I have great respect for this work. I’m an artist, not a critic, so accept that my point of view is coming from the studio and from where I might be if I could paint like this. Painting is a serious business. There are artists today who might trivialize the practice, even mocking the entire history, but by doing so, they only acknowledge the essential role it plays and how it informs every other medium. If a Carol Wainio exhibition is in your neighbourhood— don’t miss it. ■

“Carol Wainio” was exhibited at Galerie René Blouin in Montreal from November 25, 2006, to January 6, 2007.

Randall Anderson is an artist and writer living in Montreal. He recently received a commission for a public sculpture at Concordia University’s Fine Arts building.