Jay Isaac

A painter’s painter is a rare peacock in the grey forest of cool theory and ethical puritanism that is the Toronto art scene. Jay Isaac is one of these fortunate exceptions. Even among a small group of local painters coming of age in the 1990s he is often associated with (Andre Ethier, Brad Phillips and the late Chris Rogers), Isaac stands out for his non-wavering commitment to painting, demonstrated through honed academic skill and formidable art historic knowledge. His recent exhibition “High Gloss Ceilings,” comprised of nine small acrylic paintings (28 x 22 or 30 x 24 inches), all from 2017, is significant for its turn to the overtly figurative from his comparatively abstract works painted from 2010 to 2017. Isaac has not made an about-face, though: abstraction remains, but in combination with a surrealisttinged figure-centred imagism. His move towards figuration from abstraction matches that of the global art world over the past several years—a paradigm shift from abstract painters such as Jacob Kassay, Lucien Smith and Laura Owens to figurative painters such as Kerry James Marshall, Dana Shutz and Nina Chanel Abney. Yet, I detect personal rather than movement-based motivations behind Isaac’s progression.

In fact, the exhibition title refers to his past work as a house painter, a straight-up highlighting of this exhibition as autobiographical—at least in part. That title also hints that the show holds comedic overtones, since the notion of “high-gloss ceilings,” a deliberately unflattering design choice, satirizes tasteful bourgeois home decorating. High-gloss ceilings, unlike the conventional matte painted ones, cause garish distracting reflections. Isaac even maintains a mock business website offering this undesirable service, a discrete side project that is only abstractly connected to the exhibition. Nonetheless, a loose abstract connection makes for an effective titling of this show, as Isaac’s eccentric, absurdist imagery is best interpreted not by seeking overall articulated themes but by delighting in an engaging range of autonomous references.

Isaac sources his eclectic imagery from both personal experience and art history. For example, Removing the Stone of Madness, After nods to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, 1494, via a close-up outline portrait of the man being operated on in the original painting. Meanwhile, another eponymous painting, Ualrlife, resembling a book cover, displays the cryptic text “Ualrlife,” the cut-off title of an imaginary novel, Sensual Hell and Afterlife, that the artist pretended to have authored. Isaac coheres these disparate references formally. The paintings, initially destined to be silkscreens, bear common stylistic features designed to perform effectively in that printmaking medium. Blunt, often black, outlines and discrete colour blocks do translate successfully to paint, granting the compositions graphic directness and flatness. This printmaking influence is particularly explicit in School for Creative Anarchy with its grey and black lines that shape and enclose monochromatic blue, pink and white loosely organic abstract forms.

The notion of a school for anarchy is absurdly paradoxical. And absurdist humour, which in Isaac’s current paintings could be deemed stoner surrealism for its mix of the hallucinogenic and the ludicrous, further unifies the exhibition. Consider how the flaccid ghostly figure in Downtown Dick, After Georgia O’Keefe flops over the New York City skyline like a rejected Macy’s parade float. Despite its deflated state, it shows off disproportionately large male genitals. It is powerless yet boastful. Then consider Crass Delirium 22, in which a tiny man mounts the back of a giant grasshopper, a proportion switch that could read as a reversal of the conventional human/insect power dynamic. In contrast to this silly cartoon, Bad Applef is laugh-out-loud hilarious. A portrait of a man bearing an evil smile marks the side of an apple and stands as a perfect illustration of the ridiculousness of visualizing an idiom (“bad apple”) literally.

Another solid link between works is a visible dedication to the painterly, a commitment ultimately characterizing Isaac’s career. In this exhibition you see a richness of colour, a Baroque dark-light contrast and a confident economy of brush stroke. Take, for instance, Energy Equation with Spectre, a front-and-centre depiction of a lightbulb, a cliché if there ever was one. Other than a few rapid sketch lines and a mischievous white spectre inexplicably placed in the lightbulb’s centre, very little light emanates from this light source. Black, vaguely figurative shapes surround it; even the mustard yellow and burgundies in the background reveal black underpainting. Serious painting underlies the irony. Isaac has abstracted the bulb to rescue it from a fate of triteness, rendering it adroitly with resonant steel blue tones and white flourishing highlights. The painting resembles more a Picasso mandolin than a pedestrian lightbulb. In Energy Equation with Spectre you witness Isaac’s painting at its best: a balancing of the knowingly ironical with the sincerely traditional. ❚

_“High Gloss Ceilings” was exhibited at Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto, in December 2017.-

Earl Miller is an independent art writer and curator based in Toronto.