Harold Klunder at Clint Roenisch Gallery
Prices on request. Until Oct. 26, 944 Queen St. W., Toronto; 416-516-8593
'Real painters never give the public what it thinks it wants," I wrote in this column on Oct. 31, 2006. One of the real painters I was referring to was Harold Klunder, and the discussion was about the tough, beautiful paintings - like the anguished The Unknowable Secrets of the World - he was then showing at Toronto's Clint Roenisch Gallery.
There are four big new Klunders at the Roenisch Gallery right now, and they are there partly because a part of the public clearly did know what it wanted. Two of the four new paintings were commissioned by a couple who live in Nassau. When the Roenisch show is over, Klunder is flying to the Bahamas to install them in the couple's home.
"They gave me total freedom to do whatever I wanted to do," Klunder told me a couple of days ago on the phone from his Montreal studio. "Only the size was a given," he added. "There were no restrictions of any kind as to colour and content."
Good thing, too. I can't imagine Klunder working to prescription, coughing up a primarily blue or mostly green canvas to smooth out a room's décor. I ask Klunder how come there are four paintings here, if the couple commissioned only two?
"I just couldn't do only two in that format," he tells me. (The new paintings are each 9½ x 6½ feet.) "I had to make four, so that I could work back and forth among them. Usually one informs the other." (Klunder has always tended to work on a number of paintings at the same time, visiting and revisiting each one, building it up gradually over time).
"Which two are headed for Nassau?" I ask him. "I don't know," he says. "I like all four!"
Me too. What's not to like? The four big paintings, all of which share the overall title Sun and Moon, gleam like Eldorado with hot golds and scalding oranges -which are then cooled by attendant shadows, often, as in Sun and Moon IV, arranged to provide a context for giant figures that have shouldered their way into the paintings.
The figures are really rather new for Klunder. There were always lots of faces staring out of Klunder's maelstroms of pigment, but not many full-length figures. I ask him where the figures are coming from and he says probably from the English painter Francis Bacon.
Francis Bacon? The one painter whose work I cannot bear?
"Well, it's the sense of traditional space in his work that I like," Klunder tells me. "I like the way his figures are set in a deep space within the canvas. I want that sense of depth too." (Notice that in Sun and Moon IV, the figures sit within a kind of box or cage structure - the way Bacon's screaming popes did in his early paintings.) Klunder says he has come to regard an all-over, abstract surface for a painting - which is the norm for contemporary abstract painting - as "a quick fix. It doesn't give you much to live with." He maintains that deep space, by contrast, does.
I can't get past Klunder's new Francis Bacon-ism. "Bacon has raw power that isn't about style," says Klunder.
" Your paintings don't have any style," I tell him. "That's right," he says, rather proudly. "I just poke away at them. It's like picking at a scab or something."
Michael Levine and Anna Silverstein at QueenSpecific
Until Oct. 27, 787 Queen St. W., Toronto; info@QueenSpecific.com
There's always something challenging and lively in the narrow, vertical, vitrine-like slot of window-gallery next to Toronto's Dufflet Pastries on Queen Street West, but the current installation - by Toronto-based, award-winning set and costume designer Michael Levine (with long-time collaborator, artist Anna Silverstein) - is a knockout.
The work is titled Climb and Change (a sprightly pun on "climate change") and consists of a tiny ladder (made of recycled paper) - which is supposed to be supporting a minuscule man who is now at the top of the ladder, trying to change a light bulb. (The sun? Maybe he can stick some ozone back up there while he's at it.) The trouble is, the ladder is impossibly thin and impossibly high, and seems to have grown longer in the course of his climbing it - to the point where it now hangs in the space like a length of film stock, coiling up on the floor. The more this little Sisyphus does climb, the more climbing he still has to do (ask any ecologist).
The work is touching, cunning, witty and exhausting all at the same time. It just goes to show you how little a great stage designer really needs to make theatre happen.
Pierre Gauvreau at Gallery Gevik
$4,700-$42,000. Until Oct. 16, 12 Hazelton Ave., Toronto; 416-968-0901
It is greatly to the credit of gallerist Phillip Gevik that he has brought to Toronto - for the first time in almost 25 years - a selection of the paintings of the remarkable Pierre Gauvreau.
Gauvreau, who is now 87, and who still paints all the time in his big barn studio in the Eastern Townships, is a formidable figure. He was a screenwriter - with three Geminis and a Grand Prize of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television for writing to his credit. He was also a pioneering Canadian abstractionist. Gauvreau was one of the original signatories, along with Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean-Paul Riopelle and 13 others, of the famous/infamous cultural manifesto Réfus Global, published in 1948 in Quebec, that proclaimed a new freedom for the province's artists ("Make way for magic!").
Gauvreau took a lot of that freedom for himself, and in the Gevik exhibition, you can sample his progress as a painter from 1980 up to the present. The paintings are often wonderfully raw and robust - like the muscular Ballad for John Wayne from 1980 - and then, sometimes, Matisse-lyrical, as in the delightful Luxe, calme et volupt é (Charles Baudelaire). Later, by 1998, Gauvreau begins to use spray-painting in the works and this makes paintings that are "faster," but which betray no diminishing of invention. On the contrary, Parfois Pierre, parfois Pierrot from 2006 is a pretty hot painting for an 84-year-old artist!