Anne-Laure Djaballah at Muse Gallery Until Nov. 4, 1230 Yonge St., Toronto; www.musegallery.ca
Gazing at Anne-Laure Djaballah's new suite of paintings at Muse Gallery, I was plagued by an admittedly weird, nostalgia-driven question: What were those little creatures in Fraggle Rock, the ones who obsessively built and rebuilt tiny towers, called? Someone out there knows.
Djaballah probably remembers them. Indeed, she might be one. The Montreal-based painter's wondrous pileups in paint carry enough frantic, congested action to shame the busiest urban planner. Layering architectural forms and diagrammatic lines over erasing patches of mixed colour, and then repeating the process, Djaballah gives her canvases the halting, piecemeal dynamism of stop-motion animation.
For a painter intrigued by urban landscapes and the collision of functional and domestic architecture (Djaballah's artist statement describes her fascination with Montreal's "packed alleyways, shipping yards, oil refineries"), Djaballah wields a rather sparkly palette. No cinderblock greys here, no cold steel blues.
Instead, Djaballah blends opaque azures with chalky whites, floral pinks with coral reds, wet nail-polish shimmer with bruised purples. Her rough brushwork is sweetly counterpointed by twitchy applications of caking oil stick and thin lengths of pencil lead.
Some viewers may find Djaballah's work too busy, but I find the majority of her works perfectly balanced. When a cluster of building blocks and bent plinths threaten to overwhelm a work, Djaballah simply wipes some of them out with semi-transparent, almost monochromatic (there are always under-colours) swathes. Yet, she never covers over the good stuff, and this leads to canvases highlighted by moments of watchmaker-precise interplays of line, filled shapes and negative space.
In the last decade, Djaballah has had fewer than a dozen solo exhibitions. For all you buy-early types, here is some fresh real estate.
Duke & Battersby at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects Until Nov. 13, 1450 Dundas St. W., Toronto; www.jessicabradleyartprojects.com
Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby (better known as simply Duke & Battersby) are modern-day witch doctors - by which I mean they use primordial totems and actions to provoke insights into how we live now. Come to think of it, that more or less sums up the medical industry anyway.
In their latest multimedia exhibition, Duke & Battersby continue their career-long exploration of animal-human interaction, but up the ante with a blunt, yet resonantly poetic video portraying a knowing (yes, I mean that in the biblical sense) relationship between a woman and a female ape.
Now, before you go calling the morality police, a proviso: The video, entitled Lesser Apes, is tastefully done, with the shared sexuality of the ape and the human being presented in a fragmented, referential manner, one so remote from the physical interaction described that said exchange is practically an abstraction. This is not an art- house equivalent of one of those "Fido gets too excited" clips on YouTube.
What Duke & Battersby are really discussing is human loneliness - how contemporary life, lived in an asexual, asensual bitstream, breeds a yearning for the tactile, the inexact, the furry and the pungent.
As usual in a Duke & Battersby video, Duke provides the narration and sings odd, incantatory songs throughout. Also per usual, the video is not a linear narrative, but a mash-up of Discovery Channel-style found footage, mumblecore low-fi dramatics, performance documentation, and the duo's sparkling, inventive animation.
Lesser Apes, longer than most of their previous works, may well be Duke & Battersby's masterpiece, as it assembles, and then brings joyful, wacky life to, all of their pet obsessions: wildlife, domesticated animals, Duke's own madcap sha(wo)man persona, dissociative cognition, mortality, and the body as site of both horror and delight.
Accompanying Lesser Apes is a series of wall works and two gorgeous sculptures, all caressing the same drooling muzzle. The Beauty is Relentless, made from mouse and chipmunk bones, is a kind of skeletal standard, while Lesser Apes (Turbine), a sculpture under glass comprised of white kitten figurines, fur, and a creeping knot of fuzzy hair, looks like a cross between a cemetery altar and a drag queen's bedside table.
Duke & Battersby's world is deeply informed by the so-called "outsider" gaze. Their works employ a type of educated rawness that celebrates the perverse, and the roughly crafted, but is nevertheless highly articulate and archly considered. They may be witch doctors, but they went to school for years to learn how to shake the bones.
Raffael Iglesias at Peak Gallery Closes today, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; www.peakgallery.com
It's your last day to see Raffael Iglesias's sunny, eye-popping Mil Fuegos at Peak Gallery.
Iglesias is nominally a painter, in that he goes through a lot of paint, but I consider him more of a collagist who happens to work with liquid pigment. In any given work, one finds spray-painted stencilling, reflective tape, decals and stickers, painted lettering, and no end of manipulated laminates.
In complement to this happy assortment, Iglesias dapples his works with an array of outlined images carried from canvas to canvas, his own set of personal hieroglyphics: skulls dance with spaceships, stars and hearts encircle images of Astroboy, and hotrod flames engulf butterflies and arrows.
Like Anne-Laure Djaballah, Iglesias makes work for people who are not afraid of excess. If you could peel all the plastered posters off a hoarding and stare at the layers simultaneously, with X-ray specs, the sight might be half as mesmerizing as Iglesias's carnivals.
AT OTHER VENUES
upArt Contemporary Art Fair Until Oct. 31, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. W., Toronto
Don't think of upArt as an alternative to the Toronto International Art Fair - upArt has a community-driven energy all its own.
For Now Until Nov. 15, Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen St. W., Toronto
For Now challenges the old chestnut "art must stand the test of time" by showcasing artists whose works are devised to disappear before the next full moon.
John Brown Until Nov. 17, Olga Korper Gallery, 17 Morrow Ave., Toronto
John Brown's vibrant, violent paintings appear to have lost a fight with a particularly vicious woodland creature - they've got more scratches than any three DJs.