Sunday 6 December 1998

John Armstrong: Affirmative Paintings


Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.1

I find nothing so pleasurable as the idea of wandering through a picture gallery jammed with easel paintings — landscapes sublime or pastoral, moralizing narratives, still lifes of domestic simplicity or of regal groaning boards, portraits of physical beauty and social power. I am transported by this narrative of desire to another kind of gallery, the picture book, a source of infinite juvenile delight. The picture book was my first door to the known world, the world of facts; the encyclopedic visual detailing of the sciences, geography, illustrated histories and biblical narratives was, and remains for me, electricity to the mind.

Easel painting — the term itself seems to creak — conjures smells of fresh oil paint, turpentine, linseed oil, and images of hirsute male artists, with brushes and palette in hand. Picture books exude their own antique charm; the crack of the glued binding upon opening, the smell of the paper and ink. I am reminded of the sensual theatre of it all, and the surge of satisfaction that accompanied it. The love of paintings and books is a sublimated desire: a redirected frenzy to consume both fantasy and reality in large amounts.

John Armstrong's series of "Affirmative" paintings are about this kind of desire. They recall the charms of traditional easel painting, in their compact size and often oval shape, seeming just the thing to hang in the dining room of that narrow Victorian townhouse. Each painting is an ostentatious display of oil paint, thickly applied, scraped and scored, and gathering at the edges of the raw linen canvas. His media refers back to nineteenth-century academic methods, but his handling is contemporary — paint being a fetish now (since the Abstract Expressionists decided to drip and trowel it on) and no longer simply a medium with which to draw and colour.2

A painting, like a written text, carries within it a history of colours and textures and characteristic patterns. Call it style. A measure of interest that a painting holds for us may be determined by the degree to which the artist is capable of juggling the various lateral references that intersect in the creation of the image field. So we know that oil paint is a product of the Italian Renaissance, pre-mixed colours in tubes a product of nineteenth-century France, the canvas support a Venetian contribution. The appearance of text, the oval shapes of the canvases, and the often regular, hatched application of the paint recalls the early avant-garde works of the Cubists Braque and Picasso in the second decade of the twentieth century. The palette knife technique and the extremely unctuous paint application recall the rebel Quebec abstractionist Paul-Emile Borduas.

Each choice of media and technique signifies a history, and tells another story. Painting has been around, which unfortunately, is sometimes held against it. To paint, like engaging in any of the arts, is really a positive act, the point where human beings rise above the purely animal functions of eating, sleeping and breathing, and — not despairing over "this mortal coil" — give it a sort of romantic caché. Curiously, this act of painting has been anything but affirmative lately. It's been backed into the corners that describe hesitation, ambivalence, and tentativeness — reduced to all of those scratchy, doodly, sketchy parts that signal the uncongealed and immature. Painting as a rule today isn't affirmative, it's insecure and neurotic.

But Armstrong to his credit, pushes back hard. OK, OK, OK, Jim Dandy, YES, and Chill, are anything but indecisive. Centrally composed, (or in the case of Chill forming part of a centrally focused triangular composition) Armstrong's neo-positivism fairly jumps off the canvases. And the words lead us to different places as well — to painting's history as a commercial art, where formerly a dexterous hand lent charm and material desirability to the word, rendering letters clean and efficient or luxurious and languorous, as the case may warrant.

OK, OK, OK . . . it could be an admission, as in "Don't worry, I haven't forgotten, I know I said I'd do it, I just haven't gotten around to it yet." Or it could be breathy, drawn out, and savoured: Ok, Ok, Ok . . . . Meaning better than okay. Meaning yes. Or maybe not. There is something dutiful and less than sanguine about these "Ok's" as they march across the canvas. Jim Dandy and Chill, on the other hand, make reference to colloquial expressions of contentment and satisfaction. The rustic expression "jim dandy" seems to circle above a caricature of an abstract-expressionist painting, making light of the high drama of that genre, similar to the way the Pop artist Jasper Johns poked gentle fun at his gestural and existential colleagues. What is "jim dandy" about Jim Dandy? It returns to us the pleasure that we can still obtain from older media, older techniques, and older genre, without the ideological baggage and the stale cigarette smoke.

YES is so bloody affirmative it hurts. Nothing ambiguous about this. Armstrong has seen fit to dress the word up in the most unremittingly cheerful typeface. And unlike the plodding and regimented OK's, his YES's form an arc of delighted self-satisfaction. But it is worth identifying this YES — to grand gestures and affections, to unabashed appetites for everything in books and in paintings. YES, to art and to a culture of infinite interconnectivity. YES, to fact and fantasy, to taste, to touch and above all YES, to pleasure . . . .

" . . . and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."3

Gordon Hatt


Notes

1.         Charles Baudelaire, "Invitation au Voyage," in Le Fleurs du Mal, Classiques Larousse, Paris: 1973, pp. 40-1.
            
2.         And in case one were to miss this reference in the handling of the materials, Armstrong provides us, in Jim Dandy, with the characteristic Abstract-Expressionist style of American artist Clifford Still.
           
3.         James Joyce, Ulysses, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth: 1975, p. 704.

Sunday 25 October 1998

Sheila Gregory: Flip! A Series of 20 Paintings

Sheila Gregory's Flip! is one work, consisting of 20, 48 x 70-inch panels. The individual panels are like modules that can be assembled in any fashion to create a new composition each time. These oversized biomorphic abstract paintings are at times brushed, sprayed or poured onto canvases. Using acrylic paint, Sheila Gregory creates interleaving layers of texture, shape and line that reveal a complex relationship between the intended gesture and the happy accident. Ten panels of Flip! were first exhibited at the Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto, in 1997. This exhibition will be the first time all 20 panels of the piece will be exhibited together. Bright, energetic, almost efflorescing, these paintings are a mix between the aesthetic of graffiti art and high abstract expressionism. They exude a vitality and optimism that painting remains a life affirming activity.

Flip! may be a virtue made of a necessity. When confronted with her first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery with only a few months advance notice, the artist altered her working method from working on one, to working on several paintings at a time. While her approach to painting remained essentially the same, the paintings in Flip! are not as densely composed and have fewer layers of paint than her previous work. One might say that if Sheila Gregory's large expansive works are epic novels with a large cast of characters and subplots, the 20 paintings in Flip! Are a series of finely wrought short stories. GH

A revolution in how I paint

The following text is an edited transcript of a conversation between Sheila Gregory and Gordon Hatt on October 10, 1998:

GH: How did the short lead-time that you had in preparing for the original showing of Flip! Lead you to a different approach to painting?

SG: Flip! was the first time that I had ever worked on several panels at one time. Normally my working practise is one painting per month, and there is a lot of time spent labouring in and around each and every centimetre of a canvas. With the short lead-time for the exhibition and the challenge of creating an enormous new work, I had to rethink my studio practice: "How can I paint an 80 ft. piece that is almost 6 ft. tall in my 350 sq. ft. studio?" Those challenges are part of the intensity that drives me in the studio. Part of it is also the colour intensity, the mark-making intensity, the bearcat sensibility I like to throw into what I am doing. I really push for, and try to push myself to new edges. The work has influenced all work since then for me. I now work on a "multiple-paintings-at-one-time" approach where works are drying on the floor, stacked up to my waist height almost every other night. I have eight paintings lying on the floor around me as they are drying and in the morning I put them away and a new group of eight will come in and dry on the floor for the next set of challenges. Flip! was really important to teach me a new way of being able to work at a faster rate and in a more challenging way, overall.

GH: I would like to ask you about the influence that your participation in geological and archeological expeditions in the north has had on your work.

SG: In 1989, 1990 and 19941 had the opportunity to go up north for two-month periods of time, working on a geological crew, and the last time with a crew from McGill exploring Tule whaling villages. So, the influence of the last two trips really had the most profound effect on the work I had been doing since 1990: namely, rethinking fragments and how we derive meaning out of many pieces of a scattered, fragmented whole. Also, (I was interested in) the archeological point of view of trying to pull (those fragments) together, to then examine what the whole subject was. We were counting the cumulative number of harpoon heads (in the north) and various other data in order to assemble a sense of the history that had gone on prior to our point in time.

There are some interesting revelations in looking at the world from a scientific point of view. And there are parallels in the visual world and how, especially in the archeological sense, a lot of sight reading is initially done visually through aerial photography – flying in and, from above, choosing the best area for studying for a summer. A lot of that is picked up just through visual land formations. As your eye becomes visually attuned, you walk around and identify areas of occupation that require studying or mapping.

So, in the working process later in the studio the problem is: "How do you then distill that experience and turn it into part of your own working contemporary practise, and what do you really want to deal with there?" Going back to the archeological fragments, Flip! is comprised of 20 similar fragments or modules. They are all the same size canvases, 70 x 48 inches.

The starting point for me is usually composition, and the challenge to create a very interesting composition within one picture plane. In this particular painting, I throw the compositional tool out to the gallery director or the end manipulator of the piece to compose and thereby to derive their own meaning from the elements I have created.

GH: Do you see the marks you make on canvas as being meaningful?

SG: I was asked recently how much devotion I have to the palette that I choose. When starting a work, I let the colour work intuitively. Once I start a new series, I make a conscious decision to begin with a different scale or chroma than the previous one, which in the case of Flip! Tended to be very bright. But generally, it is not a consideration that I deal with. I spend more time thinking compositionally. Once I make that shift, I just go into the art supply store and I buy colours say, more on the earth level and the studio becomes the repository of those colours.

GH: What is the basis of that colour choice?

SG: I think it's intuitive. There was no conscious choice on my part to say it's going to be a series of very bright paintings. It started that way and it just kept going in that direction. There are two panels, however, within Flip!, which are entirely colour restricted – the two blue panels, #I0 and #13. I had restricted the palette to blue, white and black (there is very little black but there are some greys mixed in). I chose blue strictly as a challenge to myself to work on a restricted level within a very unrestricted palette, (which Flip! generally tends to have). I thought over all, that the two blue panels would be effective in stopping the eye – changing your thought process. (preventing it) from locking-in. giving you a breath, before moving on. Again, I didn't know how the whole thing would order itself up when installed (by a gallery director or curator). I made colour restrictions in those two panels but nowhere else.

I think I have been fortunate enough as an artist that I have never felt worried about where the colours start and where they end. I felt very secure intuitively with my choice of colour and how I move that into the picture plane. So, I didn't set it as a starting point, that. for example, it has to have a number of pinks and a number of yellows and so on. It just happened. The sense of having to be aggressive isn't really a thought in my work. My work tends to be rather loud and in your face; uses a lot black. There is a linear element in the work, cartoon-like references, but I think over all the colour adds into that level of impact and aggression that I bring to the work – that exuberance that has become part of my style. It's pretty hard for me to make softer paintings.

GH: What are the steps leading up to the completion of a single panel?

SG: In the case of Flip! there were 20 panels requiring two and half weeks of canvas stretching and priming. There is the anxiety of wanting to start, and in that time. thinking about what you will. Finally, the moment arrives when you have your paint in hand and you christen each panel with a colour. I couldn't put all 20 paintings in the studio at one time. I had a system devised where I could paint nine paintings each day. With Flip I wasn't putting them on the floor to dry. I arranged a house of cards in my studio where at the very beginning I just washed in one panel top to bottom in pink, and other yellow, another green and another blue ... just a flat break up of colour. I had nine of them in the studio resting side to side in a house of cards fashion. The widest wall point that I have in the studio is about ten feet. and the ceiling is about nine feet high. So, those nine paintings are drying and they come out of the studio and the next day the other nine come in, followed by the last two. I worked in cycles and it would alternate between a level of hard bodied acrylic (from a tub) and the next day might be a spray-painting session. There is a tension between what the brush is doing and what the spray paint is doing. And the spay-paint needs one day minimum to cure before it can be repainted. What I do in those beginning months is to blindly build forms, not knowing what is going to happen, what will be kept and what will be buried over. It is an additive process of just pulling out of the mind another form every day. I'll respond to a dot on a canvas and start with a colour, a line, a form, and build the form around it and set up a challenge- not working myself out that challenge that night – and two days later I'll come back and work my way through it.

GH: What is the nature of the challenge?

SG: It is the composition within one painting. Often there are bottlenecks or problems. It may be too centrally focussed. If it's too symmetrical, your mind tells you to offset. or it is too boring. too much the same. no variety. But the speed at which you have to keep working ... I would set myself a problem on each of the canvases and not worry about it because I would have another two days before I would have to get into it. (It allows you) a freshness to come at whatever that panel's problem might have been from two days prior. You can attack it with a completely open view. There is a lot of responding intuitively, quickly, and with the advantage that those two responses have . . . It was normally my process to over-deliberate and continually rethink and sit a lot before moving, whereas in the Flip! process I'm moving a lot more than I'm sitting and reflecting about the work. It was a real challenge to my working process but I thought overall it has been a really positive one since it has influenced everything I have done since Flip! was completed. That is how dramatic a shift it was: a revolution in how I paint.

Thursday 18 June 1998

RE: Work Re: Work


The Install Art Collective at the Library & Gallery in Cambridge

June 18 to July 25, 1998

In the winter of 1997 Lisa Fedak proposed to me the idea that the Install Art Collective might undertake a project of installations, interventions and performances at the Library & Gallery that specifically engaged the library, the gallery as well as the building's common foyer. It was impossible to say no. 

I had worked with the Install Art Collective as a catalogue essayist for their first exhibition, Niche, in the spring of 1995. Niche was a series of 24 installations, performances and interventions throughout downtown Guelph. At that time the Install Art Collective consisted of a core group of artists living in the city of Guelph with the addition of invited artists from outside the city. My earliest memory of the group was of a meeting at the Clinton tavern in Toronto. At least ten tables placed end to end were surrounded by twenty-six artists all talking at once, across tables, over people's heads, and behind each other's backs. The volume of all of the simultaneous conversations was so great that Lisa Fedak, the meeting's chair, couldn't be heard to call the meeting to order. It was left to Corinne Carlson, who while rising, focused her eyes in the distance and emitted a sound, similar to the high pitch of vibrating glass, strong enough and clear enough to gather everyone's attention. I remembered the enthusiasm of that meeting – the "Hey-guys-let's-put-on-a-show" energy of the group. How to say no to getting that energy back in 1998? 

My interest in seeing this new project through was of course more than just the fun and excitement of chaos. Like the artists in the group, I too am sometimes frustrated by the limitations of the public gallery space, climate controlled and self contained, existing for connoisseurs and iconoclasts, but dismissed by the larger society as irrelevant or overly precious, elitist or just downright incomprehensible. Getting out into the public's space and catching people's attention the way commercial publicity seeks out its audience is alluring. For a curator it is, in the end, just another way of drawing attention to the activities of the art gallery and to the possibilities of what art can contribute to public life. In this rests a fundamental belief that at some level, the sublimities of art can be experienced by everyone. 

But Install Art was so formless, so chaotic . . . How would the group deal with a library – an institution defined by its mandate for collecting, classifying and ordering? Moreover, as curator, there was virtually no road map that I could consult in dealing with a collective. Public galleries don't normally do that sort of thing. No one in Guelph had invited the Install Art Collective to undertake Niche in 1995 – they just did it. From where I stand today, it makes all of the difference in the world that there was no curator in Guelph, no one to mediate between the city and the artists. In hindsight, the role of curator seems all the more problematic. So what was my role? What could my role be? Was I going to make this Install Art project better, or worse? 

There was another thing too. There are significant cultural differences between being "in the street" and being "in the library." Interventionist art has an agit-prop history. Being "in the street" is symbolic of a social malaise experienced by the artist – shut out of the academy, as it were, alienated from the institutions of public discourse, finding common cause with the disenfranchised and challenging the existing iconography of authority. Authority is "inside." It resides in public buildings and private wealth. Being "inside" means to be connected to power, to acquiesce in its practise and to share in its rewards. Protest and challenge reside "outside." This could, as our gallery director reminded me on a more than one occasion, cause the library real problems. But I was completely sold by the original Install Art statement from 1995: "Our intention is to create connections between artists and communities – whether that be other artists or the community at large . . ." I didn't see this group taking aim at community institutions. 

My inclination was to find workable models for our relationship. First, I considered it a touring exhibition, meaning that it was not an "in-house production." The Install Art Collective decided who its members were and who would exhibit; each individual member would decide alone what they would exhibit. This effectively absolved me of the necessity of making curatorial decisions. I imagined the Library & Gallery as a small city, like Guelph. Its departments – Information Services, Circulation, Fiction and Children's Services, and the Gallery – were semi-autonomous states. The artists would direct their proposed installations to the managers of the various departments. This would retain the character of the 1995 installations which were independently negotiated between the artists and small business people, property owners and city authorities. Moreover, this was a solution aimed at preventing a flood of proposals arriving at my desk, many of which I would have no power to authorize, while at the same time preventing a flood of proposals arriving at the office of the chief librarian. 

So, it seemed like a plan. It first had to be approved by the gallery director and the management committee of the library. The gallery director, Mary Misner, was nervous about the lack of curatorial control. I assured her that the model that the group had developed in Guelph for negotiating space would adapt itself very well to the departmental system of the library. It was a convincing argument that said, "Let the librarians decide what they can tolerate, and what they can't." 

I then took the proposal to the chief librarian, Greg Hayton. After struggling a bit to explain the concept of "interventionism" to him, I received his full support. I was invited to make a presentation to the management committee where I outlined my idea of the library as a city in miniature, in which artist's proposals would be made to the various department heads. I wanted to make the managers of the various departments comfortable with the role into which they were being thrust. They were in effect becoming programmers and curators of the public spaces they managed. 

When in doubt, managers, unlike owners of business and property owners, are inclined to look up the ladder to the next level of authority. They are trained to work as a team, and they chart carefully the political map of authority, its principalities and semi-autonomous republics. Sitting at the management table, the eyes of all of the various department heads of the library were on me. As I spoke about the history of Install Art, the Niche exhibition and how I envisaged it would play out in the Library & Gallery I sensed a light, buoyant mood in the room. Everyone was glad to go for the ride, and if it went wrong, I, at the head of the table, spouting off god-knows-what to them, would be the one to buy it. "Sounds great Gord. Keep us posted," went the general response. The show was a go. 

Perhaps in my zeal to sell the concept to the management, I had also unwittingly sold myself. Perhaps I believed too much in my own rhetoric, my own clever analogies and the tidy organizational structure that I had conceived and negotiated. The exhibition of course would be nothing like that. I attended meetings of the group to represent the interests of the Cambridge Galleries and to answer any questions the artists might have in dealing with the library. Inevitably I felt the pull of debates and issues which were outside the role I had defined for myself. I was attracted to the debate over the theme and title of the exhibition, and stopped myself when I felt that I had offered more than I should – hardly an easy thing to do for someone full of opinions like me. But I felt this strange pull, and it wasn't just me, straining at my self-imposed leash either. To act like a curator was to impose myself and my vision; to pull back was to invite unmediated conflict. It was as though the Install Art Collective formed a whirlwind of energy, its centre a vortex for those attempting to organize a unified front. At various times any number of us felt sucked into this vacuum, floating in space, gasping for air, waiting for Corinne's siren song. 

The creative process is chaotic by its very nature. It doesn't follow predictable paths, and doesn't conform to conventional assumptions. After the exhibition, I spoke with Install Art Collective member Ian Cauthery about the Work Re: Work experience, about why exhibiting institutions "don't do that sort of thing." I said to Ian that as a curator you must be ready to "embrace the chaos" that is Install Art. Reflecting on this later, I realized that while this chaos is a weakness of the Install Art Collective, it is also its greatest strength. The Install Art Collective organized itself to riff on the theme of work in a public library and art gallery. When so many individuals are given a virtual free reign, ideas are generated, images rendered and situations created, that I, as an individual curator, never could have imagined. The power of a collaborative exhibition such as Work Re: Work is that it is so much more than the vision of one person. 

What was great about Work Re: Work? It was its scope. It involved new media and old, monumental scale and miniature, interactive and static. It was everywhere in the Library & Gallery – in the face of more than a few people – yet it was also discreet. Life went on. Books and videos were checked out, magazines were read, homework was done. People felt the ripples, or they ignored them. And little epiphanies took place. 

Gordon Hatt, 1998 

Thursday 4 June 1998

Blue in Green: Regan Morris's MOAT


March 5 to April 19, 1998 at University of Waterloo, Modern Languages Building

Organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge Alberta
While I was browsing the 80 small polychrome paintings in Regan Morris's exhibition MOAT, I began reflecting on the recurrence of the colour green. The "green" in Morris's paintings is not one mixed with up-market cadmiums or ultramarine pigments. It is not the green that made a fashion appearance in the late Eighties in the form of the acid green T-shirt, nor the opaque and bluish "teal" currently popular in automotive finishes and pro-sports uniforms. Morris's green is at base a Sap Green, a vegetal pigment - cheap, unstable and prone to fading. At its greatest saturation, it approaches black. You find it commonly used in exterior enamels to paint the eaves' troughs and gables, windows and door frames, front porches and sometimes the surrounding yard fences of those familiar turn-of-the-century red and yellow brick houses found in eastern Canadian cities. It is only ever matched with white, sometimes forming an interior faux wainscotting on a plastered wall, up to chest height, above which would be white enamel. This was the beverage room aesthetic, the pool room, the diner - a hockey calendar on the wall, a Sweet Caporal poster, a top-loading Coke machine with ten-ounce bottles standing in cold water. 

Sap Green and white were mixed as a durable wall colouring for the tiny foyers and narrow stairwells of duplexed houses. It turned up, almost without fail, in shared rooming-house kitchens. The more likely something might come in contact with a wall, the more likely it would be painted an enamel pastel green - washable, or at least, less likely to have to be washed. It darkened, took on a yellowy brown tinge from cigarette smoke, cooking grease and age. Often, wallpaper that had at one time carried a patterned dream of rococo elegance for a middle-class home, was later painted over with that functional pastel green by succeeding slumlords. As the mortar and lathing beneath the wallpaper began to crumble, cracks and stress marks would appear, making the walls seem like a decaying, putrefying and sagging skin. 

My personal memories of this green begin with my family driving from the treeless avenues of war-time bungalows on Hamilton mountain, to the older communities of green trimmed, three-story red brick houses surrounding Gage Park, where narrow streets were shaded by maples and elms, and teemed with children and traffic. We had spaghetti at my aunt and uncle's flat on the second floor. My brother and I ate off a card table in the hall. 

I must have encountered a hundred of those cheerless green foyers, stairwells and shared kitchens in search of a cheap place to land on my feet when I was going to school or leaving it, or breaking up or getting together. This pale enervated green was sometimes referred to as "puke green" as a measure of our increasingly sophisticated distaste, or less commonly "snot green," perhaps referring to the same bodily fluid that is also used to describe a "phlegmatic" or cold personality. "Snot green" cast an ugly functionality over my first homes away-from-home. We lived like guest workers, oppressed by the colour culture of our environment. We were the counter-culture in those days - green was the system - and we talked about how cool it would be to get rid of it - make the whole place white. We did, and the owners, taking advantage of our renovations, sold the properties at the first opportunity. 

The thing about "this green" is that it is inherently unstable. It begins to fade noticeably as soon as it is applied. Shadows of the original colour are left in the areas not exposed to light, and the bleaching acts as a visual record of the passage of time. Regan Morris has established a reputation for creating wistful, elegiac images of decay through his distressed monochromatic surfaces. In MOAT, he found a vehicle for these qualities in familiar colours we know to age before our eyes. He employs dozens of shades of that stupid old green - probing memory, exciting rushes of recollection - rendering in a colour the experience of time lost. 

Gordon Hatt, 1998 

Thursday 29 January 1998

Brent Roe's autodogmatic, 
anti-transcendent trip

Consciousness, to paraphrase Pascal, differentiates humanity from just so many blades of grass.1 Maybe it fell to the visual arts in the twentieth-century to remind us of this. What better way to illustrate enlightenment than in the single, instantaneously apprehended image?
Beginning in the war ravaged Europe of the 1920's and in the war time America of the 1940's, abstract artists liberated themselves from the responsibility of reproducing images from life and discovered the powerful and liberating possibilities of making art in the existential present. These artists no longer saw the canvas as a window through which to view a metaphorical diorama. They saw it as a flat surface, with which to record the spontaneous, the accidental and the physical properties of painting. The new painting was to be about being alive "to the moment"  to the chaos of unmediated feeling. The artwork did not, nor could not, describe, represent or symbolize this new attitude. It became a record of a lived event or, existed as a self contained, parallel entity.
Brent Roe's paintings are not abstract or non-objective in the commonly understood meaning of the terms. Yet, he is an inheritor of this legacy of abstract art and its influence carries through to the present day. Strongly affected by abstract art in Toronto in the seventies, and its promise of personal freedom, Roe for a time painted energetic, non-objective, abstract canvases. Toward the close of the decade, however, he and many other young artists at the time experienced a profound discontent with the received culture of abstraction.
 "It was getting outside of a mind set, getting into the unconscious, away from the linear way of thinking, once you start to smear paint around you kind of get lost in it. I'd spent a good couple of years painting abstract -- going at it with a bit of a fervour. Then I got into figurative. I started to feel that the abstract just became another academic theory."2
 The younger generation of artists to which Roe belonged was influenced by the convergence of political issues in the early eighties. A renewed cold war and arms build-up, economic recession, environmentalism and feminism brought into relief the degree to which the culture of abstract art had become cloistered, and had drifted away from contemporary life. It had become, quite simply, just another "genre"  an academic style with its own rules and standards -- removed from any direct, experienced connection to the present. The old principals and taboos of the abstractionists started to seem stale and academic. Young artists experiencing the turmoil of these years became less reticent about making direct references in their work to political issues.3
 Brent Roe's initial forays away from abstraction were toward images that had environmental and cold war references. In an early painting entitled Two Ways of Passing an Island (1980),4 Roe contrasted a benign storybook nature, represented by a whale swimming in one direction, to a malevolent humanity, represented by an air plane dropping a bomb, flying in the opposite direction.
 One painting in the Cambridge Galleries exhibition which may trace its roots to this earlier, political period in the artist's work is Dead Poor People (1992). On a swirling white ground a simply painted, thin black line frames an image of the earth, as seen from space. Below the black-line frame the artist inscribed the three words "dead poor people."
Dead Poor People may be about all of the people who have lived without having a monument in their name. Perhaps it is a cartoon of a memorial that questions the role of individuals and those we choose to memorialize. But what is political in this work is not so much an issue of current affairs as it is an issue of perception and the manipulation of symbols in general. The mere fact of being an artist in the 1990's is an implied rejection of mass marketed images of proscribed meanings and values. Every aspect of Dead Poor People is a rejection of the warm embrace of the production values and ideology of the corporate media environment.
Separated by a dozen years, Two Ways of Passing an Island and Dead Poor People describe not so much a political program as an aesthetic. It is a cultivated, naive, style of lazy, enervated lines, and weightless, schematically described, floating forms. In the 1980 painting, Roe renders the bomber a rubber child's toy. In the later painting, he contrasts the thinly painted floating earth with the baldly wooden epigram "dead, poor, people." Aimless painterly gestures are anchored by the goal oriented alliteration Perfectly Purposeful People (1995). An articulated phrase of corporate optimism, Rational Future, floats above a white surface tortured with scumbled black lines and etched with graffiti and tattoo like markings (1997).
Contemporary life is characterized by a universe of expanding emotional and perceptual complexity. If art is a politically redemptive act, it is not because it can instruct people. It is because aesthetics can model the existence of new forms and new perceptions and can validate our most elusive and tangled feelings. In Brent Roe's work we can describe an "aesthetic of ambivalence," where the authority of each statement or gesture is undermined by its opposite. It is an ironic, self-conscious aesthetic. It is informed by a knowledge of art history and an interest in the processes of perception. It is also an expression of the lived sense of the difficulty of making an unequivocally authoritative artistic statement.
 "In painting, make that experience of perception a real one, an honest one."5
With text and imagery constantly in a state of opposition these paintings cannot lead anywhere, or better said, they cannot lead to any other place than the paintings themselves. Titles such as Is (1993), Eternity Is Amongst Us (1995), Where It's At (1995), Less Is More (1996), and Is Often Desiring (1996) are notable in their use of intransitive verb constructions to this end.
The earliest paintings in the exhibition, Hi, Dead Poor People, and Fate (all 1992), Hidden Meaning, Aspirations, Awaken From Your Trance, and Is (all 1993) mark a break with previous, more densely painted work and call upon a simplified, almost minimalist aesthetic. These paintings all have in common a gesturally active, swirling, white painted ground above which hover texts and images. The painting Is shows the artist making reference to his heritage of abstract colour field and expressionist painting. In the middle of the white ground he has painted a cartoon of a colour field painting. It is a circle in a square, bisected diagonally and broken into the complimentary contrasting colours of red-green and blue-orange. In the centre of the cartoon he has painted the word "IS."
In Is Roe consciously combines the elements of gestural expressionist painting, which he associates with the unconscious, and colour field painting, which he associates with a pure retinal experience of colour and form. The text connects Roe to conceptual, text based and interventionist artists who critique the politics of language and mass media. Related in form, the innocent and disarming Hi achieves the same end with understatement and humour. A minimalist painting within a painting – a black outlined, yellow ochre square hovers again over the active white painted ground. Within it a purposefully painted diagonal black line moves from side to side to side. Dangling from the end of the line, contained within the shape of a droplet, is the word "Hi." It is an anti-message   a minimalist, two letter greeting. Its "moment" is much like a touch on the sleeve. In tying these three historical movements together in these paintings Roe underlines their common goal. Namely, to create a fissure – a short-circuit in our programmed expectations -- to create an experience of the moment.
 The charts Bacon of Hope, Chart #1, and Chart #5 (all 1994) continue to employ the agitated white ground. Employing the pun to great effect in the Bacon of Hope, Roe has rendered a thinly painted slab of bacon surrounded by the words fertilizer, jazz, chips and sex. Like Hi, it is disarmingly banal, mundane. The summary, thin painting and the random references to apparently unconnected commodities like fertilizer and chips suggest the artist may be connected to a dangerously dissolute and entropic state.
 "Went out to buy some bacon one day and did a painting of a strip of bacon. It's about trying to find hope and having these disparate words floating around."6
Seven searching words resisted being a mistake, The world will not end any time soon, and Compost Your Theories (all 1994) make direct reference to the work of the American abstractionist Philip Guston. A Guston-like crosshatch of shaky, pastel brushstrokes again floats above the common swirling white ground. The Guston references are topped with a text icing that seems to struggle against the indeterminacy of the paint. The command "Compost Your Theories" and the affirmative "The World Will Not End Anytime Soon" struggle for authority on a shifting ground. The anti-message  unlike the conventional Cassandra, there is essentially nothing to report here  makes for a wistful painting. It is a post-adolescent, reality without angst.
"No point in behaving like things are going to end, because they won't."7
Where It's At, Perfectly Purposeful People, Expand Your Moment, Eternity Is Amongst Us, Real Meets Real, Decorative Sun (all of 1995), and Is Often Desiring, (1996) mark a stylistic change for the artist. The active white ground is replaced by a transparent polymer sizing over a raw canvas. The thin, hesitatingly transparent applications of paint have been replaced by solid opaque colours. The imagery and text still seem to float in the centre of the canvas. Speaking about the painting Where It's At, Roe relates the text to the act of painting and the viewer's experience of it in the moment, suggesting that "where it's at," is on the canvas, or perhaps in other words, "what you see is what you get." The text is a play on the well-known hipster saying, a kind of campy finger snapping, jive talking satire of academic art criticism.8
Soft on Space, Please Position Your Poetry Within These Parameters, and Less Is More, (all 1996), mark the artist's shift to acrylic paint and with it, a greater opacity and illustration board quality to the imagery. In these paintings the artist may be less involved with the act of painting and more interested in conceptual and perceptual issues. Less Is More is a flesh toned ground covered by scumbled white lines, pink lozenge forms and green dots. It features a central image which appears to be the content of a large blue lava lamp. It is skewered by black lines on the ends of which are supported candles and skulls and flames and red droplets. Floating in white biomorphic balloons is the text "less, is, more."
Beyond the immediate contrast of the functionalist credo with the spontaneous and emblematically kitschy, Less is More signals perhaps a new attitude by the artist toward the canvas. The figures and text in his most recent body of work Autodogmatic Trip (1996), Rational Future, Twin Heads of Yes and No, Together We Can Perfect the Moment, All those seeking meaning line up behind this canvas, Strangely Content, and I Am Dreaming About Time (all 1997) seem etched into, or to exist within an enveloping space. The ground has become an ersatz body, a living organism. It is no longer a hypnotic swirl of paint -- it has become a torturous tangle -- literally a web in I Am Dreaming About Time. Roe's figuration has become less idiosyncratic too, resembling more the schematics of graffiti and the obsessions of adolescents who doodle on their notebooks, running shoes and jean jackets.
 Painting was, and always remained for Roe, about being alive to the chaotic, unmediated "moment", as the title of the painting Together We Can Perfect the Moment (1997) reminds us. Autodogmatic Trip features a tangled, scumbled and tattooed ground with the bare description of a recessional space. An articulated text, "auto-dog-ma-tic," is enclosed in biomorphic balloons. The word "TRIP" is constructed of three-dimensional block letters at various angles, inscribed with paisley, stripes and wavy coloured lines. Like cartoon figures, the letters seem to shake with energy. "Trip," and things "trippy" recall the descriptive slang of the drug culture of the late sixties. Mining our personal and cultural past for material, Roe uncomfortably reminds us of the explosive and introverted mind of both a personal and cultural adolescence. But what is "autodogmatic" about it? Maybe it is a neologism  a conflation of "dogma" and "autoerotic"  about the artist setting his own goals. Or maybe this "trip" is a voyage of solipsistic reverie.
Gordon Hatt
Notes
1."Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. . ."
Blaise Pascal, Selections from the Thoughts, ed. & trans. By Arthur H. Beattie, Northbrook: AHM Publishing, 1965, p. 30.
2. Interview with the artist, November 1997.
3. See "Discussion" and Clark, T. J., "More on the Differences between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves," in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbault and David Solkin, pp. 165-194,Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1981.
4. Exhibited in Artventure, The Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank Plaza, Toronto, July 10 - August 29, 1980.
5. Telephone interview with the artist, January 1998.
6. Telephone interview with the artist, November 1997.
7. Telephone interview with the artist, November 1997.
8. A parallel could be made with the street scam that goes something like this:
"Five dollars says that I know where you got your shoes."
            "You got your shoes on your feet."

Catalogue of works in the exhibition
1. Hi, 1992, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
2. Dead Poor People, 1992, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
3. Fate, 1992, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
4. Hidden Meaning, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
5. Aspirations, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
6. Awaken From Your Trance, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
7. Is, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
8. Bacon of Hope, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
9. Chart #5, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
10.          Chart #1, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
11.         Seven searching words resisted being a mistake, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
12.         The world will not end any time soon, 1994, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
13.         Compost Your Theories, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
14.         Where It's At, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
15.         Perfectly Purposeful People, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
16.         Expand Your Moment, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
17.         Eternity Is Amongst Us, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
18.         Real Meets Real, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
19.         Decorative Sun, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
20.         Time to Rhyme, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
21.         Soft on Space, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
22.         Please Position Your Poetry Within These Parameters, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
23.         Less Is More, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
24.         Autodogmatic Trip, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
25.         Is Often Desiring, 1996, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
26.         Rational Future, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
27.         Twin Heads of Yes and No, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
28.         Together We Can Perfect the Moment, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.
29.         All those seeking meaning line up behind this canvas, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.
30.         Strangely Content, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

31.         I Am Dreaming About Time, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.