Articles

The Place of Painting
The Beautiful Lament
Of Prayer Wheels & Day-Glo
Infra-Mincers
Writings on the Wall
The World in a Sanded Grain

Winnipeg painter Eric Allan Cameron is making a big statement in a small way. He is producing a body of oil paintings on canvas paper, the largest of which is 20 x 15 cm and the smallest is 9.5 x 7 cm, on the subject of landscape, camping and fishing. The large painting shows a minimal landscape in which a fluctuating black horizon line stretches from one side of the composition to the other, while the water and sky are indicated through delicate blends of red and green. The small painting, which is Cameron’s favourite in the series, shows a float plane, so tiny the pontoons are only a suggestion in the water, viewed head-on. Both these paintings, and all the others in the series so far, are painted and then sanded down, sometimes as many as four times.
Beautiful Monsters

“I was thinking about the idea of how to build a more monstrous monster,” says Cindy Phenix, a Quebec-born artist who now lives in Chicago. In her most recent paintings she has concentrated on ways to picture these meta-figures performing acts of ambiguous purpose and meaning. About Birds, Blue and Strangers, 2019, shows a pair of women either caring for or conflicting with one another. The figure on the left wears blue pants, turquoise eye shadow and a slash of rouge across her cheek that looks more like blood than blush.
Magic Carpeting

The Druze artist Fatma Shanan has carpeted the world. Or less ambitiously, she has made a world for herself out of the carpet. Her strategy for the last decade has been to find a way to make the carpet a metonym for her own body and being. A common and revered domestic object, the carpet has been dislocated from its conventional context and made into a vehicle for introducing the tension among individual identity, the difficulty of achieving it and the necessary collective identity in Druze and Israeli culture.
Gillian King

Gillian King’s exhibition “Sediment” at Galerie Nicolas Robert comes at exactly this moment. Here, the stark white walls and grey concrete floors are eased into the season, thanks to the eight telluric canvases that hang evenly throughout the space. These large-scale works are the latest in King’s production—one that is concerned, both on material and philosophical levels, with the relationship among painting, the earth and the body. Their muted palettes of ash and lilac, rust and blush, ochre and sage are derived from dyes and pigments that the artist makes herself, coaxing them out of locally sourced plants such as sumac berries and black walnut, cooking scraps of red and yellow onion, discarded rose petals, and fresh-picked wildflowers, using traditional methods better known in the textile and quilt making trades.
Helen Marten

Meeting the tremendous spatial demands of König Galerie, a former cathedral in Berlin, is the immensity of Helen Marten’s labour. The effort put forth to collect, build and present her work filled me with awe, and relief. This wasn’t going to be just another quick romp. When encountering Marten’s installation, you might first embrace the intense overall structure. But then the body follows the eye inside the work, into the infinite realm of small things and materials, which seem equally recognizable and strange. The installation is comprised of three sections, or rooms or environments. However, not one of these terms is accurate as they seep into each other in proximity and the way that objects found first in the “bathroom” later reappear in the “garden,” and again in the “workshop.” Marten’s colour palette is one of fairy tales: cream, peach, lavender, aquamarine, camel, yellow and white, all of which render an anthro-poetic tale of sociocultural development from the perspective of someone who has a special relationship to language and form, art and craft, and the real and imaginary.
Monica Tap

Monica Tap’s current exhibition at MKG in Toronto is comprised of nine paintings that are linked by subject matter and theoretical concern. All nine landscapes offer views of zones where water meets land and are thus quite literally paintings of reflections on watery surfaces. Two facing paintings, both aptly titled Amnesia, in the smaller front space establish the visual economy that will be radically contravened in the gallery’s larger back space.
Martin Pearce

Visually noisy yet neutral in tone, the 11 abstract non-compositions that make up Guelph-based artist Martin Pearce’s “Mud and Iron” seem to long for the palliative, soft-on-the-eyes aesthetic of an off-white wall. Up close, though, the futility of that longing emerges in the violent traces of Pearce’s process, by which paint and encaustic wax have not only been dabbed and brushed into thick layers but also scraped off, bored into and chipped away, revealing a blindingly complex catastrophe of colour and substance.

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