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.
