-- evolved as an art form in the seventeenth thru early nineteenth centuries in Japan
1) -- principally attentive to time and place
-- must contain a seasonal reference called a "kigo" -- traditionally this reference to season appears in the first or third unit of a three phrase poem
2) -- contains a Buddhist reflection on nature (essentially Zen, i.e. -- a momentary ‘perception’) -- in Christianity, nature has fallen; not so in Buddhism because there was no creator-being in Buddhist cosmology -- no beginning = no end
3) -- relies on the premise that all natural things are i) transient ( ever-changing), ii) contingent (dependent upon occurence/circumstance), iii) they suffer.
4) -- haiku poetry always suggests a “breach of meaning” [Barthes] -- a playful possibility of changing and multiple meanings.
-- root-origin is in the middle ages from a form of collective poetry known as "renga" (three or more poets would construct five line poems strung together in verse):
i) first three lines (called "hokku") in a 5 - 7 - 5 syllable count from poet #1
-- the second line might be broken by a dash or a colon to create a 3 - 4 , or a 4 - 3 syllable split for reasons of rhythm or ‘pivot’ (change of meaning
direction)
ii) next two lines in response in 7 - 7 syllable count from poet #2
iii) first three lines of the second verse, by poet #3, as inspired by the first verse, returns to the 5 - 7 - 5 count, however changes the subject, season or meaning
iv) the intellectual play is traditionally concluded after the 36th verse (36 verses known as "kasen" -- this ‘style’ of poetry exercise known as "haikai no renga"
-- throughout the entire poem-play "kake-kotoba" are important; they are ‘pivot’ words that poetentially change meaning and levels of ‘reading’
-- the advent and widespread employ of the printing press eventually changed the social context of "renga" into the more individualistic creative aspects of "haikai" (this word, in fact, meaning sportive or playful)
-- in the eighteenth century the words "haikai" and "hokku" were collapsed into "haiku"
-- Haiku’s earliest three masters were Basho (the seeker), Buson (the artist), and Issa (the humanist).
"Hokku":
Melancholy wind
Sky black - Anticipation
Rain, where’s your thunder?
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
David Hall, “Shifting Ground”, Warren Flowers Gallery, Dawson College, Montreal, February 14 - March 7, 2007
Under the title “Shifting Ground”, Vancouver-raised, now two-decade-long-, Montreal-resident-artist, David Hall, presented a ten year sampling of oils on canvas, highlighting ‘cityscape’-subjects, with a short-reference to seascape / landscape painting.
[Historically] ... Except for one brief episode of ‘clarity’ in 1930’s [North]American social-realism, the success (i.e. critical-worth / celebratory-status) of urban-realist-painters has remained largely factitious. ... Like the most considerable urban-realist-artist of ‘that’-depression-era [ Edward Hopper] , David Hall’s city-works remain essentially unclassifiable.
In casual conversation, the soft-spoken Hall dropped the names of Manet, Goya, Velasquez, Turner, and (Richard Parkes) Bonnington, ... -- as much “appreciated” forefather-painters. However, no substantial, stylistic comparisons to these masters can be drawn in studying Hall’s “Shifting Ground”. ... [ Aside: numerous, sky-scape compositions, ‘in studio’ -- that is to say, works NOT selected for exhibition, at this time -- did demonstrate an affinity in subject matter with Turner and Bonnington] ... When pressed to identify more ‘relevant’ / recent inspirational sources, the artist named Hopper, California ‘Pop’-artist, Wayne Thiebaud (re: specifically, Thiebaud’s San Francisco, “big-hill”, landscapes), and Canadian, Group-of-Seven member, Frederick Varley.
.... With pause, and under scrutiny, various aspects of the aforementioned ‘sources’ did finally carom. Something of a sense of dislocation [read: Goya or Hopper], with the love for a buttery-pigment, soft-tensile line and lavish-stroke of surface [read: Manet or Thiebaud], and Varley’s ‘northern’ evocation of loneliness, merged and glanced on the face of Hall’s oeuvre. To be truthful to ‘period’- and subject- references -- nineteenth century ‘romantic’ landscape tradition, dirty-thirties- realism, California ‘Pop’, and good-old ‘Canadiana” (respectively) -- allusions could also be drawn to Whistler (in two ‘gems’ of a night-cast bridge, bluntly titled “Bridge#1”, and “Bridge#2”, both from 2006), to lesser-known, Isabel Bishop (--abscent her parade of foreground figures--, for a ‘30’s-type, realist ‘mood’ -- more sorrowful than indignant -- see: “Asylum”, 1996), to Ed Ruscha (for fascination with the complexity and prolification of 50’s and 60’s highways and byways -- view: “Pincer”, 2005) and to Canadian artists Légaré and/or Hébert (for empty, landscapes /cityscapes that abundantly collected and absorbed light -- visit: the ‘dry’-flattened passages of “Tower”, 2001, or “Meadowlands”, 2006).
At this point, ... this report ... (decidedly NOT a review)... begins to play happlessly like some Academy-award ‘thank-you-speech’ -- blog-blah --
[...] Returning to the near-present and [near] intent: Warren Flower’s Gallery Director, and exhibition curator, Giuseppe Di Leo, selected “Shifting Ground” works for their “broad-sweeping volumes of aerial view and space, ... imaginatively challenging the viewer to find a ‘safe’ place to land”. [... ] The artist declared himself “most successful when discovering a resolution between drawing and painting”. [...] One visitor saw Hall’s urban, architectural vistas so manifestly standardized as to become more a ‘sign’ than a bit of ‘reality’ ... they became icons of averageness -- put-downs of the dehumanization of the city-scene ? [...] At last, another departing guest thought “Shifting Grounds” -- with its’ binding thread of water and waterways snaking around and about -- to be a metaphor for a reality which flowed out of an exploration to (purely) ‘paint’.
T.L. Mtl 2007
[with thanks to Dawson College, community-commentary during the ‘hanging’]
[Historically] ... Except for one brief episode of ‘clarity’ in 1930’s [North]American social-realism, the success (i.e. critical-worth / celebratory-status) of urban-realist-painters has remained largely factitious. ... Like the most considerable urban-realist-artist of ‘that’-depression-era [ Edward Hopper] , David Hall’s city-works remain essentially unclassifiable.
In casual conversation, the soft-spoken Hall dropped the names of Manet, Goya, Velasquez, Turner, and (Richard Parkes) Bonnington, ... -- as much “appreciated” forefather-painters. However, no substantial, stylistic comparisons to these masters can be drawn in studying Hall’s “Shifting Ground”. ... [ Aside: numerous, sky-scape compositions, ‘in studio’ -- that is to say, works NOT selected for exhibition, at this time -- did demonstrate an affinity in subject matter with Turner and Bonnington] ... When pressed to identify more ‘relevant’ / recent inspirational sources, the artist named Hopper, California ‘Pop’-artist, Wayne Thiebaud (re: specifically, Thiebaud’s San Francisco, “big-hill”, landscapes), and Canadian, Group-of-Seven member, Frederick Varley.
.... With pause, and under scrutiny, various aspects of the aforementioned ‘sources’ did finally carom. Something of a sense of dislocation [read: Goya or Hopper], with the love for a buttery-pigment, soft-tensile line and lavish-stroke of surface [read: Manet or Thiebaud], and Varley’s ‘northern’ evocation of loneliness, merged and glanced on the face of Hall’s oeuvre. To be truthful to ‘period’- and subject- references -- nineteenth century ‘romantic’ landscape tradition, dirty-thirties- realism, California ‘Pop’, and good-old ‘Canadiana” (respectively) -- allusions could also be drawn to Whistler (in two ‘gems’ of a night-cast bridge, bluntly titled “Bridge#1”, and “Bridge#2”, both from 2006), to lesser-known, Isabel Bishop (--abscent her parade of foreground figures--, for a ‘30’s-type, realist ‘mood’ -- more sorrowful than indignant -- see: “Asylum”, 1996), to Ed Ruscha (for fascination with the complexity and prolification of 50’s and 60’s highways and byways -- view: “Pincer”, 2005) and to Canadian artists Légaré and/or Hébert (for empty, landscapes /cityscapes that abundantly collected and absorbed light -- visit: the ‘dry’-flattened passages of “Tower”, 2001, or “Meadowlands”, 2006).
At this point, ... this report ... (decidedly NOT a review)... begins to play happlessly like some Academy-award ‘thank-you-speech’ -- blog-blah --
[...] Returning to the near-present and [near] intent: Warren Flower’s Gallery Director, and exhibition curator, Giuseppe Di Leo, selected “Shifting Ground” works for their “broad-sweeping volumes of aerial view and space, ... imaginatively challenging the viewer to find a ‘safe’ place to land”. [... ] The artist declared himself “most successful when discovering a resolution between drawing and painting”. [...] One visitor saw Hall’s urban, architectural vistas so manifestly standardized as to become more a ‘sign’ than a bit of ‘reality’ ... they became icons of averageness -- put-downs of the dehumanization of the city-scene ? [...] At last, another departing guest thought “Shifting Grounds” -- with its’ binding thread of water and waterways snaking around and about -- to be a metaphor for a reality which flowed out of an exploration to (purely) ‘paint’.
T.L. Mtl 2007
[with thanks to Dawson College, community-commentary during the ‘hanging’]
Lynn Millette, “Interior Experience”, Galerie McClure, Montreal, February 2 - 24, 2007
... At last, the rarity of an art exhibition that lives up to the expectations of the press communiqué / artist statement ! ...
Although word and image have longtime been intimate bedfellows, an overview of [most] recent Montreal, artist-com-writer endeavours witnesses only broken plots, shattered language, decomposed harmony, and randomly-mixed logic -- in essence, an impoverished rant of dépassé “art speak”- hyperbole. Might it be that many [post]po-mo artists actually came to embrace a heterogeneity without hierarchy -- a value[less] system without boundaries -- and so assumed that if they could, in fact, successfully express themselves in paint (or other medium), it followed [automatically] that they were proficient in word ? ...
Lynn Millette’s “Interior Experience” -- a 2003 - 2006, collection / presentation of large-scaled, acrylic on canvas paintings (with complementary text) -- is an exception to the above-mentioned, clichéd tendency. Millette, at once, [perhaps unknowingly] gave nod to an ancient Mesopotamian thought: “writing is the mother of eloquence and the father of artists” [see the artist’s Ph’d dissertation dealing with “the experience of artmaking, body, self and word as ontological environment”, Concordia University, 2005), and went onto display a sense of being [today] for which few of us have any single concept or status in our [much-too-much] rationally-organized, mental life.
Entering the gallery, and moving clockwise through the space [initially without the benefit of text], various phenomenological associations were immediate, ‘real’ and almost electric. Viewers were bombarded with echoes of scientific study -- reflections / reminiscences [actual or imaginatively-extrapolated] of days of ‘enlightenment’ with one eye to the microscope and a nose in the textbooks of biology and / or mineralogy... Millette’s paintings were instantly powerful and emotional pathways modulating a spontaneous expression / experience of the universal ‘self’ ...
‘Ocean (viewed from within)’, 2005 -- the first canvas by the door -- cast a jellyfish-shaped, allusion to a neuron-sparked, gentle ‘epiphany’; [next] a composition with a series of concentric rings (right-ground) shot a ‘spinal’-arc (mid-space) to a small-coloured explosion (far left) -- the human brain’s ‘medulla oblongata’ firing through the ‘foramen magnum’ into the spinal cord to ‘ignite’ sensations? ; and [then] two, much-detailed panels -- one entitled: “Weaving Emotions” -- suggested the intricate patterning of microscopically-viewed animal-tissue.
... Culminating the exhibition project -- [logically] the two largest compositions --“Dream Interrupted”,2003, a diptych, and the most-freshly-painted, “untitled”, 2006 -- were rich to be mined for further allusion to the evocative power of instinctive memory . In both works, the “neuroimaging” of thought and the phenomena of consciousness mysteriously conjoined. ... [More fanciful now]: The pulsating, white-on-black lines of “Dream Interrupted” [urgently] whispered of heartbeat monitoring charts, sub-oceanic, (geological) surveys of volcanic islands [violently] coming-into-being, or sharp-pointed sword jabs [and subsequent ‘splashes’ / ripples] into the wetlands of sensory experience. The right-hand panel of the [overall] ominously dark “Dream ...” added a tach of colour and extended the splash / ripple effect.
... “Untitled”, 2006, collapsed the organic and the mineral in an elegant ‘visual’ twist on a ‘soma’ [a.k.a. : a “perikaryon’ -- from the Greek for “body”]. Its’ [‘myelin’] sheath -- bridging analogies to a ‘dendrite tree’ [mass, left] and an ‘axon terminal’ [mass, right] -- sprouted ‘crystalline’ attachments vaguely similar to micro-sketches of the elements molybdenum (commonly used in rifle-barrels) and titanium [from ‘Titan’ -- a reference to a superhuman task]. -- the sci-fi, inkling of an impending cyber-marriage between flesh and steel ?
Finally, after a ‘wildly’ interpretive perusal of the paintings, a reading, absorbing and paraphrasing of the artist’s written statement(s) of intent: Millette sought to “record the process of self-reflection”, (...) “to focus on the sensations inside her body and trace the anatomical journey of her thoughts”. (...) While focusing on her physical state “metaphors emerged in her imagination” (...) Her paintings “came from deep inside and materialized on the surface of the canvases” (...) “Line, like an electrical current, marked her experience of time” (...) “an accumulation of coiled lines created hills and valleys that reflected an internal landscape of sensory experience”. (...) Beneath her, the artist imagined “cables, lines and other networks like nerves, veins and tissue“ (...) “The bridge she crosses from the inside to the outside of her body when she makes art is not the same bridge she crosses when she speaks or writes” (...) -- BUT ASSUREDLY that bridge was a fabrication by one and the same architect / engineer -- one artist much emotively stabile in fleshing-out cognitive processes relating to perception, interpretation, imagination, memory and [crucially] language !!
Paradoxical as it may seem, Millette’s way of allowing subterrainial ‘things’ to become visible and alive, might be read as an affirmative effort to just let things be. Afterall, [realistically] is our current language system prepared to accept such integrating, passive-activity, all-the-while inhibiting an ‘aesthetic’ that might endorse the production of non-products ? ... “Interior Experience” [re]presents various elusive holotropic states of awareness dealing with the concept of absolute consciousness vs. the “void” (the void being the source of all creation).
Picture: ...“Being is in nothingness ... and nothingness is being in the form of being”
[Azriel of Gerona, in the thirteenth century]
T.L. Mtl. 2007
Although word and image have longtime been intimate bedfellows, an overview of [most] recent Montreal, artist-com-writer endeavours witnesses only broken plots, shattered language, decomposed harmony, and randomly-mixed logic -- in essence, an impoverished rant of dépassé “art speak”- hyperbole. Might it be that many [post]po-mo artists actually came to embrace a heterogeneity without hierarchy -- a value[less] system without boundaries -- and so assumed that if they could, in fact, successfully express themselves in paint (or other medium), it followed [automatically] that they were proficient in word ? ...
Lynn Millette’s “Interior Experience” -- a 2003 - 2006, collection / presentation of large-scaled, acrylic on canvas paintings (with complementary text) -- is an exception to the above-mentioned, clichéd tendency. Millette, at once, [perhaps unknowingly] gave nod to an ancient Mesopotamian thought: “writing is the mother of eloquence and the father of artists” [see the artist’s Ph’d dissertation dealing with “the experience of artmaking, body, self and word as ontological environment”, Concordia University, 2005), and went onto display a sense of being [today] for which few of us have any single concept or status in our [much-too-much] rationally-organized, mental life.
Entering the gallery, and moving clockwise through the space [initially without the benefit of text], various phenomenological associations were immediate, ‘real’ and almost electric. Viewers were bombarded with echoes of scientific study -- reflections / reminiscences [actual or imaginatively-extrapolated] of days of ‘enlightenment’ with one eye to the microscope and a nose in the textbooks of biology and / or mineralogy... Millette’s paintings were instantly powerful and emotional pathways modulating a spontaneous expression / experience of the universal ‘self’ ...
‘Ocean (viewed from within)’, 2005 -- the first canvas by the door -- cast a jellyfish-shaped, allusion to a neuron-sparked, gentle ‘epiphany’; [next] a composition with a series of concentric rings (right-ground) shot a ‘spinal’-arc (mid-space) to a small-coloured explosion (far left) -- the human brain’s ‘medulla oblongata’ firing through the ‘foramen magnum’ into the spinal cord to ‘ignite’ sensations? ; and [then] two, much-detailed panels -- one entitled: “Weaving Emotions” -- suggested the intricate patterning of microscopically-viewed animal-tissue.
... Culminating the exhibition project -- [logically] the two largest compositions --“Dream Interrupted”,2003, a diptych, and the most-freshly-painted, “untitled”, 2006 -- were rich to be mined for further allusion to the evocative power of instinctive memory . In both works, the “neuroimaging” of thought and the phenomena of consciousness mysteriously conjoined. ... [More fanciful now]: The pulsating, white-on-black lines of “Dream Interrupted” [urgently] whispered of heartbeat monitoring charts, sub-oceanic, (geological) surveys of volcanic islands [violently] coming-into-being, or sharp-pointed sword jabs [and subsequent ‘splashes’ / ripples] into the wetlands of sensory experience. The right-hand panel of the [overall] ominously dark “Dream ...” added a tach of colour and extended the splash / ripple effect.
... “Untitled”, 2006, collapsed the organic and the mineral in an elegant ‘visual’ twist on a ‘soma’ [a.k.a. : a “perikaryon’ -- from the Greek for “body”]. Its’ [‘myelin’] sheath -- bridging analogies to a ‘dendrite tree’ [mass, left] and an ‘axon terminal’ [mass, right] -- sprouted ‘crystalline’ attachments vaguely similar to micro-sketches of the elements molybdenum (commonly used in rifle-barrels) and titanium [from ‘Titan’ -- a reference to a superhuman task]. -- the sci-fi, inkling of an impending cyber-marriage between flesh and steel ?
Finally, after a ‘wildly’ interpretive perusal of the paintings, a reading, absorbing and paraphrasing of the artist’s written statement(s) of intent: Millette sought to “record the process of self-reflection”, (...) “to focus on the sensations inside her body and trace the anatomical journey of her thoughts”. (...) While focusing on her physical state “metaphors emerged in her imagination” (...) Her paintings “came from deep inside and materialized on the surface of the canvases” (...) “Line, like an electrical current, marked her experience of time” (...) “an accumulation of coiled lines created hills and valleys that reflected an internal landscape of sensory experience”. (...) Beneath her, the artist imagined “cables, lines and other networks like nerves, veins and tissue“ (...) “The bridge she crosses from the inside to the outside of her body when she makes art is not the same bridge she crosses when she speaks or writes” (...) -- BUT ASSUREDLY that bridge was a fabrication by one and the same architect / engineer -- one artist much emotively stabile in fleshing-out cognitive processes relating to perception, interpretation, imagination, memory and [crucially] language !!
Paradoxical as it may seem, Millette’s way of allowing subterrainial ‘things’ to become visible and alive, might be read as an affirmative effort to just let things be. Afterall, [realistically] is our current language system prepared to accept such integrating, passive-activity, all-the-while inhibiting an ‘aesthetic’ that might endorse the production of non-products ? ... “Interior Experience” [re]presents various elusive holotropic states of awareness dealing with the concept of absolute consciousness vs. the “void” (the void being the source of all creation).
Picture: ...“Being is in nothingness ... and nothingness is being in the form of being”
[Azriel of Gerona, in the thirteenth century]
T.L. Mtl. 2007
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Jesse Allarie, mixed-media, chez Café Shaika, January 2007
Would it be unreasonable to draw a parallel between modernism’s almost recklessly-accelerated quest for innovation -- a quest culminating in the ‘reductivist’ visual excesses of Abstract-Expressionism or Minimalism -- and most, recent, ultra-high-technological change, which appears to have catapulted contemporary, western culture far- and blindsightedly- ‘ahead’ of any ideological centre? Arguably, both ‘evolutions’ have led us to a point of precarious balance offering the polar oppositions of catastrophe and creation as legitimate possibilities of human destiny.
By no means is the ‘chez Shaika’ showing of young, Montreal artist, Jesse Allarie, a conscious, in-depth, reflection on these societal circumstances. On the other hand, in an outpouring of mixed-media and diverse genre, Allarie has intuitively encompassed something of the duality of a nostalgic desire to return to various aspects and values of a once ‘respectable’ modernism versus a fascination with the apparent valuelessness of high-tech overproduction. Diverse stylistically, eclectic historically, and sometimes contrary and immanent in person preoccupations, Allarie, at once, references a popularized past and a trivialized present with a combination of skills and gaucheries.
‘Chez Shaika”, a dozen +, wall-mounted compositions recycled and remarried art concepts and styles of modernism’s not-so-distant past. A rich fabric of quotations resulted from a myriad of familiar sources gave nod to artists such as Rauschenberg, Pollock, Warhol, Jenkins, Bacon, de Kooning, and Rivers, ... Indeed the underpinnings of Allarie’s most substantial suite -- the so-called REKKORDZ series -- might be read as a ‘dramatization’ of the endless seriality, intertextuality and pastiche of the late-modern era. Numerous long-play, vinyl records were drip-, splatter- , and gesture- painted, mounted on their respective album covers (similarly treated), then presented frontally, in frames of one- , four- , or nine- units. Snippets of ‘original’ album graphics and text, hummed on through a rhythm of kitschy P & D. The nine-unit, Tic-Tac-Toesque arrangements were particularly ‘vocal’ in underlining modernism’s once, cutting-edge technology [i.e. the ‘78’], reduced to no more than a ‘play’ful support for irony, witticism and / or paint.
In a similar ‘dark’ vein -- one, slightly plus-human-scale, high-tech construction -- a solitary, flat-black, monochromatically-painted assemblage of computer-age detritus, entitled HANDGUN -- stood as a sentinel in the middle of the exhibition space. It whispered of a conceptual collision between the all-neutralizing painting technique of Nevelson and the sci-fi ‘imaginings cum realities’ of H.R. Giger, and took aim at ‘meaning’ already destabilized by the impending obsolescence of even our newest technologies.
Despite a penchant to [re]present visions of cultural exhaustion, Allarie’s exuberance carries the potential for imposing a changed, aesthetic perspective onto the future. His ongoing artistic endeavours may very well prove to respond [finally] to Claes Oldenburg’s 1970 [then] ‘pivotal-time’ call “for an art that embroils everyday crap and comes out on top.”
T. L. Mtl. 2007
By no means is the ‘chez Shaika’ showing of young, Montreal artist, Jesse Allarie, a conscious, in-depth, reflection on these societal circumstances. On the other hand, in an outpouring of mixed-media and diverse genre, Allarie has intuitively encompassed something of the duality of a nostalgic desire to return to various aspects and values of a once ‘respectable’ modernism versus a fascination with the apparent valuelessness of high-tech overproduction. Diverse stylistically, eclectic historically, and sometimes contrary and immanent in person preoccupations, Allarie, at once, references a popularized past and a trivialized present with a combination of skills and gaucheries.
‘Chez Shaika”, a dozen +, wall-mounted compositions recycled and remarried art concepts and styles of modernism’s not-so-distant past. A rich fabric of quotations resulted from a myriad of familiar sources gave nod to artists such as Rauschenberg, Pollock, Warhol, Jenkins, Bacon, de Kooning, and Rivers, ... Indeed the underpinnings of Allarie’s most substantial suite -- the so-called REKKORDZ series -- might be read as a ‘dramatization’ of the endless seriality, intertextuality and pastiche of the late-modern era. Numerous long-play, vinyl records were drip-, splatter- , and gesture- painted, mounted on their respective album covers (similarly treated), then presented frontally, in frames of one- , four- , or nine- units. Snippets of ‘original’ album graphics and text, hummed on through a rhythm of kitschy P & D. The nine-unit, Tic-Tac-Toesque arrangements were particularly ‘vocal’ in underlining modernism’s once, cutting-edge technology [i.e. the ‘78’], reduced to no more than a ‘play’ful support for irony, witticism and / or paint.
In a similar ‘dark’ vein -- one, slightly plus-human-scale, high-tech construction -- a solitary, flat-black, monochromatically-painted assemblage of computer-age detritus, entitled HANDGUN -- stood as a sentinel in the middle of the exhibition space. It whispered of a conceptual collision between the all-neutralizing painting technique of Nevelson and the sci-fi ‘imaginings cum realities’ of H.R. Giger, and took aim at ‘meaning’ already destabilized by the impending obsolescence of even our newest technologies.
Despite a penchant to [re]present visions of cultural exhaustion, Allarie’s exuberance carries the potential for imposing a changed, aesthetic perspective onto the future. His ongoing artistic endeavours may very well prove to respond [finally] to Claes Oldenburg’s 1970 [then] ‘pivotal-time’ call “for an art that embroils everyday crap and comes out on top.”
T. L. Mtl. 2007
Justine B. Tétreault and Hélène Cenedese: Recent Painting at Galerie d’art Quartier Libre, Montreal, February 1 - 25, 2007
Justine Bourguignon-Tétreault and Hélène Cenedese, who collectively swept Fine Arts’ Achievement Awards at Dawson College (2002-04), subsequently went onto enroll at Concordia University where they remained, at once, close colleagues in the study and practice of painting, and gracious competitors for [limited] exhibition space and [scant] much-needed, critical attention [ ... despite all well-intended efforts of artists, their art agents, reviewers, etc. ... Montreal offers only a shallow pool of opportunity for none but the most inspired and initiated]. Young-career-comradeship continuing -- coy, curatorial-coupling in play -- Tétreault and Cenedese, have confidently issued their most recent body of work under the title “Arrière - Pensées” -- a duo-presentation of [mostly] acrylic on canvas compositions providing individual-creative-vision, complement and contrast.
Tétreault showed self-portraits exclusively. Loose-painterly in a manner to include the occasional discordant slash of colour -- several images of ‘self’ evaded any easy ‘traditional / historical’ classification of portraiture. Far in time and spirit from the ‘classical’ Greek narcissus, void of any semblance of psychological introspection (e.g. Durer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, ...), and [almost] totally avoiding the the oft-contradictory concept of the P-M “recentered ‘I’ “ (too-easily defined as: ‘a realization of a reality of alienation’ juxtaposed to a futile wish for a ‘meaningful relocation’), the viewer was cast into uncertain waters ... The artist’s principal oeuvre -- THE KILL, 2006, did ‘touch’ upon aspects of “recentering” , if only superficially so. A near-life-scale, auto-portrait of the artist, clad in undergarments -- antique, flintlock rifle in-hand -- stood bold in front of an empty ground -- empty, expect for the magnificent (dead) peacock at the hunter’s feet [thinking mythologically -- at Diana’s feet ]. ... [or, was the artist killing-off NBC’s Pop-culture icon? the alchemist’s plume? ... a conventional acceptance of ‘beauty’? ] ... The flat-painted black garments and hair, the amorphous background, the casual ‘quick-grounding’ tach of shadow at matador-slippered heels, and the nonchalant stare directed towards the viewer [read: “what are you looking at !”] whispered of Manet. The much empty, upper-left space of THE KILL begged for a revisit to Titian’s concept of ‘occult balance’ ... but then ‘off-balance’ may very well be the pointed-message -- socially-speaking -- of the project -- was Tétreault hinting at the urgency for a ‘peek’ / ‘glance’ into the reality of current-day ‘youthful’ disenfranchisement?
Cenedese largely replaced representational imagery with the passionate embrace of relatively extreme degrees of abstraction, painterly freedom and intuitive process. An ambitious body of small- and medium- scaled, mixed-media on canvas works offered complex-layered and sensuous surfaces, somehow ‘eloquent’ despite a much-reserved use of pigment and the introduction of throwaway materials. Smudge upon veil, drip over splatter, matte vs. shiny, tarry beside cracked, char-blacks splashed in cream-white, ... Cenedese’s compositions were defiant of ‘most’ aesthetic conventions and conflictual in formal consideration. The artist ‘spontaneously’ manufactured her painting surfaces as though they were ‘ghost - memory’ studies of rough, sometimes heavy / other times ethereal, timeworn, weather -scarred ‘walls’ -- walls of insidious charm evincing a sensibility shared by Tachist-, Arte Povera-, and ‘New Image’- artists (not to mention Leonardo centuries before them). ... There was something in the ‘reflection’ of a world, rich in the ‘beauty’ of decay or destruction, that offered a poetically charged resonance where a sense of the age-old opposites of energy and matter met. [...] When Cenedese did work in a more representational mode, her paintings were filled with wit or ‘inverted’ cliché. Witness the tiny canvas entitled “Le secret”, 2006 -- the stylized, line-drawing of a hummingbird hovered poised to decorticate the image of a human head bedecked in shredded strips of discarded, newspaper article -- think of the inversion: “thought for food”.
Tétreault, tall, fresh-blushed in cheek, and casual in attire / Cenedese, elegant in classical, little-black-dress and heels, gracefully co-hosted “Arrière-Pensées”. [... ] And a bright, complementing and contrasting spectacle of painting ‘wowed’ the viewer.
T.L. Mtl. 2007
Tétreault showed self-portraits exclusively. Loose-painterly in a manner to include the occasional discordant slash of colour -- several images of ‘self’ evaded any easy ‘traditional / historical’ classification of portraiture. Far in time and spirit from the ‘classical’ Greek narcissus, void of any semblance of psychological introspection (e.g. Durer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, ...), and [almost] totally avoiding the the oft-contradictory concept of the P-M “recentered ‘I’ “ (too-easily defined as: ‘a realization of a reality of alienation’ juxtaposed to a futile wish for a ‘meaningful relocation’), the viewer was cast into uncertain waters ... The artist’s principal oeuvre -- THE KILL, 2006, did ‘touch’ upon aspects of “recentering” , if only superficially so. A near-life-scale, auto-portrait of the artist, clad in undergarments -- antique, flintlock rifle in-hand -- stood bold in front of an empty ground -- empty, expect for the magnificent (dead) peacock at the hunter’s feet [thinking mythologically -- at Diana’s feet ]. ... [or, was the artist killing-off NBC’s Pop-culture icon? the alchemist’s plume? ... a conventional acceptance of ‘beauty’? ] ... The flat-painted black garments and hair, the amorphous background, the casual ‘quick-grounding’ tach of shadow at matador-slippered heels, and the nonchalant stare directed towards the viewer [read: “what are you looking at !”] whispered of Manet. The much empty, upper-left space of THE KILL begged for a revisit to Titian’s concept of ‘occult balance’ ... but then ‘off-balance’ may very well be the pointed-message -- socially-speaking -- of the project -- was Tétreault hinting at the urgency for a ‘peek’ / ‘glance’ into the reality of current-day ‘youthful’ disenfranchisement?
Cenedese largely replaced representational imagery with the passionate embrace of relatively extreme degrees of abstraction, painterly freedom and intuitive process. An ambitious body of small- and medium- scaled, mixed-media on canvas works offered complex-layered and sensuous surfaces, somehow ‘eloquent’ despite a much-reserved use of pigment and the introduction of throwaway materials. Smudge upon veil, drip over splatter, matte vs. shiny, tarry beside cracked, char-blacks splashed in cream-white, ... Cenedese’s compositions were defiant of ‘most’ aesthetic conventions and conflictual in formal consideration. The artist ‘spontaneously’ manufactured her painting surfaces as though they were ‘ghost - memory’ studies of rough, sometimes heavy / other times ethereal, timeworn, weather -scarred ‘walls’ -- walls of insidious charm evincing a sensibility shared by Tachist-, Arte Povera-, and ‘New Image’- artists (not to mention Leonardo centuries before them). ... There was something in the ‘reflection’ of a world, rich in the ‘beauty’ of decay or destruction, that offered a poetically charged resonance where a sense of the age-old opposites of energy and matter met. [...] When Cenedese did work in a more representational mode, her paintings were filled with wit or ‘inverted’ cliché. Witness the tiny canvas entitled “Le secret”, 2006 -- the stylized, line-drawing of a hummingbird hovered poised to decorticate the image of a human head bedecked in shredded strips of discarded, newspaper article -- think of the inversion: “thought for food”.
Tétreault, tall, fresh-blushed in cheek, and casual in attire / Cenedese, elegant in classical, little-black-dress and heels, gracefully co-hosted “Arrière-Pensées”. [... ] And a bright, complementing and contrasting spectacle of painting ‘wowed’ the viewer.
T.L. Mtl. 2007
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