Martin Golland

For Setting the Stage, his second solo show at galerie antoine ertaskiran, Martin Golland produced a suite of paintings depicting metafictional locations, in which notions of theatricality and stagecraft share the billing with his more familiar architectonically charged landscape motifs. As always, Euclidean geometrical logic and axiomatic linear perspective are jangled explosively, while pictorial coherence and compositional decorum are achieved in a manner that could not exist in the observable world around us. If we were to suddenly experience something like this while walking down the street, it would not bode well. These works collide the visual language of photorealism with that of gestural abstraction, and organize their compositions through the syntax of collage, ultimately presenting themselves as skilfully finished, coolly pleasurable pictorial fields, mostly painted on canvas, with some small pieces on Mylar as well. These depicted places, which are clearly images about depiction, occur outdoors, indoors and sometimes indeterminably in between. Productive ambiguities like these, along with the pleasures of looking in a manner that already is a form of skeptical thinking, have been present in Golland’s work going back a decade or so, since he began exhibiting professionally. His process has long since involved painting from mixed-media collages that he fabricates, although he has never shown these as works in themselves, until now. A small grouping of such collages rounds out the show, adding another tactical approach to his method of installing an exhibition.

Some other things have changed too. Golland’s work in general has always remained depopulated, speaking of a human presence only through the remains, or unfinished architectural constructions, and at times apparent failures in these domains. Human presence always seemed to have been phased out; this illision intentional on the part of the artist, for whom painting the figure was not so much taboo as outré. But ultimately so much so that this absence began to transmute into a kind of presence, and Golland has now reanimated his stage with a ghostly, but nonetheless present cast of characters. To paraphrase Willem de Kooning, perhaps the requirement or demand to not paint the figure ultimately generated the need to do so.

In the smallish painting The Director, for instance, an unnervingly masked personage emerges from a sort of quasi-perspectival hyperspace, seemingly in the act of being about to speak, with some kind of message or instructions for the viewer. Appearing more like an actor playing the role of director than a stand-in for the artist, this spectral figure’s dapper clothes and louche attitude belie the uneasy feeling of staring at the painting. When is a mask telling the truth about its wearer’s identity? At the very least, when what’s underneath cannot possibly be known, or be said to exist without it, so the masker’s nature exists only as indexical absence, a cipher. In authoring such an image, the putative act of obscuring becomes the method of revealing meaning. One implication of this is that picturing something directly can devolve into a seductive but dishonest ploy, cloaking darker aspects of representation, in which claims of visual truth emanate from authority and are not to be trusted. The fissures and warps in the spatial fabric of Golland’s work can be said to symbolize their relativistic and skeptical attempts to make more complex or defer a definite reading of their meaning.

A likelier candidate for subtle auto-representation is the somewhat larger and also funnier canvas The Captain. As well as through the titular nod, the piece alludes to rock cult idol Captain Beefheart (aka Don Glen Vliet), whose esoteric antics and creative spirit quietly fuel the painting. Though reminiscent, this figure too involves another identity dodge, as he holds a paper bag-like mask with eye and mouth holes cut into it in front of his face. As in the painting Fool and several others including The Director, we are reminded again of jesters, clowns and buffoons, with their ability to say and perform things within society that others cannot. This identification of artists and painters with professional fools has a long history in art. But here, because the only knowledge or judgement of things present is manifest as a revelation of the erasure of stable identities, what is transmitted is a morphology that questions our ontological certainties. This includes rote artistic motivation, raising the possibility that to make imagery by hand (especially painting a human presence) is to manifest the criticism of doing so. Some of Golland’s Escher-like stairways to nowhere and useless edifices (e.g., in the assured pieces Set and Stage) seem to imply the futility of representation through the failure of their conventional functions. Or at least the comic absurdity of making art now, its oversaturation in society and generally disappointing inability to influence the world at large.

By balancing critical self-reflection with the desire to renew his work, along with an irreducible element of enjoyably manifest skill, Golland stages a suite of pictorial set pieces, whose signifiers engage energetically with the traps and tropes of painting, fusing them with the metaphor of drama. It’s a clever stratagem to have stolen upon the critique of painting in this manner, mixing the warmth of painterly commitment with almost Brechtian distancing, so that aesthetic balance is achieved. This approach inverts traditional stage conventions, where plot diachronically unfolds while accepting the real/mimetic and audience/actor dichotomies in absolute terms. In this kind of contemporary theatre as in Golland’s painting cabaret, we are made aware of the undramatic, synchronic formal qualities that all art shares when we look behind the curtain. ❚

“Setting the Stage” was exhibited at galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montreal, from September 2 to October 10, 2015.

Benjamin Klein is a Montreal-based artist, writer and independent curator.