David Alexander

In his essay, “Some Paragraphs on Modern Drawing,” for the Cleveland (UK) 6th International Drawing Biennale in 1983, John Elderfield, Curator Emeritus at the MoMA in New York, wrote, “Drawing at its most basic…is line drawing. Drawing at its most basic is therefore drawing at its most conceptual, for drawn lines are symbolic and conventional. They contour the identity of things in the world but in the world they do not properly exist.” This quote serves as an entry point to consider a recent survey exhibition of work by Canadian painter David Alexander, at the Kelowna Art Gallery. The show occupied two galleries: the smaller one was dedicated to the artist’s drawings and a selection of his book works, and the larger gallery housed the canvases. The exhibition, titled “The Shape of Place,” curated by Liz Wylie and accompanied by an impressive monograph published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, will travel to a select number of venues through 2014. That a sizeable portion of the exhibition was dedicated to Alexander’s field studies acknowledges the importance of observational drawing in his practices, and presents a valuable insight into the defining conceptual motif of his paintings, which is, at least in this writer’s opinion, drawing.

In his book The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984) author Michel de Certeau describes space as “a practiced place.” For de Certeau, place is understood as delimited, demarcated, strategically fixed locations in social, economic and physical infrastructures. He describes space, on the other hand, as temporal, fragmented, open and frictional; that human actions or “tactics” undertaken upon the coordinates of place generate “space”; and both place and space are interrelated and reciprocal. While properly read inside an interventionist or relational aesthetic framework, and in reference to manufactured environments and manoeuvres, it would nonetheless be an interesting conceptual exercise to imagine an equivalent to de Certeau’s thesis for the matrix of man and nature, for the artist and the subject, which is landscape. It would be a stretch to call Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night or Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire artistic interventions, though considered purely as an intellectual abstraction, positing such a conceptual interrelationship might provide a novel angle of critique. What if landscape were considered a place in this sense, how then might the artist occupy this place, what tactics might he/she deploy to translate, transform, even claim landscape as a “space?”

To explore this proposition further you could start by examining style as embodied in the type of subject performed, and in what could be called a conceptual type, or the way in which basic forms were assembled. For David Alexander, his subject is preeminently the landscape, particularly the preternaturally rugged and remote landscape, which, it may be argued, is conceptually mediated and described in the first place by drawing, specifically line drawing. While colour is also unquestionably significant to Alexander’s paintings it is in the service of a drawer’s mind and hand. Colour, I’m suggesting, and its occupation of areas of the picture plane, appeal primarily to the eye and aesthetic response, while line appeals to the intellect and cognition. Alexander is a good colourist. Colour elevates his paintings’ visuality and the phenomenological character of the subject matter, and is an essential pictorial ingredient in expanding the technical adventures. It formally resolves the painting, and makes his investment in drawing, his ontological impulse, both symbolically and conventionally complete.

Japanese Rain, Shinjuku, Gyoen, Tokyo, 2007, is a painting deeply indebted to drawing, and features a limited palette of blacks, creamy whites, jade green and browns. It’s about rain, water, wetness—difficult subjects to paint. Alexander has represented water as a flat, frontal plane replete with twisting, turning, churning activity upon which drops of rain, described by the after effect of concentric elliptical rings, ripple out from each point in the water-to-water contact. We can look at the dynamically graphic surface of this mixed-technique painting, and we can look into its watery depths, since the artist’s extensive exploitation of paint’s materiality and his varied brushwork speak equally to flatness and an anti-illusionistic presentation. The place in question is likely a pond in a precinct of Tokyo, a location transformed by the artist into an all-over painting evoking a temporal, fragmented, fluctuating reality that, even in its near-abstraction, convinces us of both the palpability of place-time location and the stylistic conviction of his artistic translation.

While Japanese Rain frames the landscape in extreme close-up, the large painting McArthur, Lake O’Hara, also done in 2007, positions the subject at a much greater viewing distance, with mountain rock faces and snow-draped crevasses dominating the composition, and a slice of Lake O’Hara plunging off the lower edge of the picture plane. Here, lines contour the myriad features of the angular, undulating granite facade with seemingly no incidence of surface or form left unexamined. It is as if the artist has pitched his powers of observation against the force and magnitude of the subject; and since there’s no evidence of an attempt to dominate or control, what is sensed is a competition governed by respect and reciprocity between the two “combatants.” In this painting Alexander opts to translate rather than to transform, assembling his basic forms in careful consideration of the geophysical complexity of the subject, combining tonal structure with his trademark linear style to carve out interlocking planes of sculptural mass. David Alexander’s drawings and paintings depict nature as a vital living thing. With stylistic and conceptual tactics he creates temporal spaces and geographic places that bring art and its subject into an open and proximate interrelationship. ❚

“David Alexander: The Shape of Place” was exhibited at the Kelowna Art Gallery from January 14 to March 25, 2012.

David Alexander: The Shape of Place, ed. Liz Wylie, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012, Paper, 108 pages, $39.95.

Gary Pearson is an artist and associate professor at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna.