“Voices of Fire: toward a post Postmodern theory of Abstraction”

Despite the somewhat overwrought promotional text, former Division Gallery director and independent curator Benjamin Klein has managed to carve out an interesting cross-section of emerging Canadian abstract painters: Megan Hepburn, Ashleigh Bartlett, Sarah Cale, Scott Bertram and Pierre Julien. Julien is the oldest in the group at 34. The show highlights the conundrums of painterly practice poking its head above ground a decade after being sunk in a morass of critical irrelevance.

Some of the painters in the exhibition at times seem set on establishing a critical distance from the pure physical joy of slapping colour-saturated goop on canvas, utilizing a strategic irony as protection against the accusations of retaining a pre-postmodern ego. The result, as always with good painters, is surprisingly satisfying.

Sarah Cale, based in Toronto, drains the individual brush stroke of the trappings of grandeur by painting first on garbage bags, letting the strokes dry, then peeling them off and reapplying them on a stained wood background. The effect is twofold. It wittily places contemporary art production in the realm of craft—the works feel similar to a black-velvet production line, an apparent dig at the pace at which contemporary artists are obliged to produce. The process also allows Cale to treat the paint as a collage object in itself and frees up her commanding drawing skills and colour sense. In Splay, 2010, the brushstroke assumes a Frankenstein afterlife: delicate tears along the body of the disembodied stroke string along, activating the surface in a scramble of marks. They hover, literally stuck to the ground in a convincingly spontaneous manner, and dance in an act of vigorous, yet distanced, drawing. They seem thrown on and magnetized, like good collage. Cale has established the most convincing argument for painting that is aesthetically engaging, yet not quite painting.

Halifax-based Scott Bertram also utilizes some elements of collage—shapes are buttressed against competing and discordant contrasts of paint application, colour and drawing. In GPB Shape (a), 2011, a masked-out shape, plucked from what seems to be another painting, is set on a tartan-like green and blue ground. In other works in that series, the grounds shift from monumental drags of colour reminiscent of Gerhard Richter to Gustonesque smears and dashes in a manner that is self-consciously awkward. The consistent cut-out figure is the only anchor—it actually looks like an anchor—in the composition. Again—it’s paint on a canvas, but not quite a painting.

Ashleigh Bartlett is the most painterly of the five. While not overtly collagist, the build-up compositions consisting of disparate marks, washes, strokes and shapes decidedly don’t speak to a pared-down aesthetic. In Untitled (red), 2010, a strategic mapping of interlocking shapes and lines is employed, not unlike the more traditional compositions of Abstract Expressionism. Blotches of red, intertwining brush lines of blue on a shaped grey field build into a full tension. Smaller work like Untitled (Two noses), 2010, betrays a straightforward exercise in layering: the build-up is evident and earlier ideas are left to breathe in spots, while the foreground builds to a crescendo of rich painterly movement, recalling early practitioners such as Charles Gagnon.

Megan Hepburn, the 2010 winner of the Joseph Plaskett award, is a compositional gleaner as well. Her forms and surfaces are less abrupt, with colour blended within shapes laid out on the canvas. Woozoo, 2010, in particular, finds its place just under the surface, a blend of illusion and physical paint in a jumble of gentle Shadboldt-like collisions. Like Bartlett, much is revealed in small pieces: Slide, 2010, is a difficult composition, with checkered forms that overlap and butt against one another in areas that at times seem tentative but somehow cobbled together to completion. The struggle is evident in the add-ons and erasures, a hard-won success.

Montrealer Pierre Julien is the odd man out in the exhibition. His contribution of four hard-edge pieces in the show is more at home in the company of the Quebec tradition of Yves Gaucher—whom he riffs on convincingly in larger works. In a smaller piece, G1, 2010, Albers-like squares are refreshingly revisited with an abrupt seaside-blue ground floating a red square sunk into a moss green. Tensions are measured, crisp and obedient, while the colour transmits disarmingly pleasurable pop vibes. Julien has a decidedly light touch with hard-edge work, but in large pieces like Mauve, 2010, he approaches the peripherally shifting composition that is the hallmark of effective practitioners like Gaucher and Guido Molinari.

In the effort to be convincingly critical or non-linear in historical practice, it’s easy to forget the simple fact that painters learn to paint from other painters. One of the great stories of this new century is the widening up of aesthetic discourse, evidenced in the everything-but-the-kitchen sink view of relational aesthetics. “Voices of Fire,” while purporting to showcase concerns of young painters, inadvertently asks the question: if the field is that wide open, why not painting? ❚

“Voices of Fire: toward a post Postmodern theory of abstraction,” curated by Benjamin Klein, was exhibited in Montreal’s Galerie SAS from March 10 to April 16, 2011.

Cameron Skene is a Montreal-based painter, writer and curator.