Ron Loranger at Galerie Glendon
Until March 10, 2275 Bayview Ave., Toronto
A dozen years ago, Canadian playwright/author (and old friend of mine) Sky Gilbert published a memoir. Embedded in that recollection is a theory of art and its relationship to audiences that I find myself still quoting today.
Here’s the reductive version: There are two types of art/audience relationships, the charming and the ejaculatory. Charming art seeks to reaffirm what an audience already knows, operates with the consent of the viewer and provides comfort. Ejaculatory art seeks to disrupt an audience’s expectations and create anarchic spaces wherein comfort is the least likely outcome.
Three exhibitions currently on view provide excellent examples of this dichotomy, or, in the case of the second exhibition, the best of both worlds.
Ron Loranger’s Blobettes, Plus – on display at Galerie Glendon – is ejaculatory in both presentation strategy and within the trajectory of Loranger’s career. Not to push the label to impolite extremes, but these mixed media works even look, well, post-coital, like no-tell motel bed sheets on Sunday morning.
Loranger has been making his signature Blobettes – tiny pools of intentionally muddied watercolour manipulated with anything from cigarette ash to body fluids until they become jewel-like baubles ever-so-slightly raised from the paper – for as long as I’ve watched his career, and I expected, this time out, more of the happy same.
Instead, Loranger is now working large, very large, dappling dinner-table-long sheets of creamy paper with multiple, densely coloured Blobettes and then further layering his scrolls with playful graphite illustrations (of tools, cars, animals, male members) plus breezy reworkings of logos and found text.
Thus, where once the Blobettes sat on the paper like objects under a microscope, the amoeboid forms now bounce about, and dominate, entire floating worlds – turning Loranger’s practice from one based on close study and introspection, crystal gazing, so to speak, to one based on exuberant, wide-ranging exploration. The former studious gem cutter is now merrily tossing carnival beads from his balcony.
Not to say that the works are any less considered – Loranger’s patient layering, a technique that makes each Blobette a flecked microcosm, is evident in every iteration. But they’re looser and more agreeable to accident, which often translates into Blobettes that less resemble polished opals and look more like, um, generative proteins expelled in romantic abandon.
Loranger’s new works embrace the propulsive half of the Gilbertian dynamic on a figurative (he has kicked his career several rungs up the ladder with his new Cinerama style) and literal (fluids, liquids in flight) level.
And that’s as much as I can say in a family newspaper.
Douglas Coupland at Daniel Faria Gallery
Until April 7, 188 St. Helen’s Ave, Toronto
Meanwhile, Douglas Coupland’s new collection of sculptures and paintings at Daniel Faria Gallery confidently and gracefully straddles the charming/ejaculatory divide.
Douglas Coupland is, of course, best known as a literary powerhouse, but he has always enjoyed a thriving parallel visual-art practice, one that is fuelled by the same buoyant populism (nicely salted with a deep suspicion of pop culture) found in his books.
Visitors to the gallery will find nothing on the walls or standing upright that they cannot immediately comprehend. The paintings include a series of large QR codes, rendered in black and white and muted colours, replicas of Group of Seven arctic landscapes recreated with grey-on-grey blocks and patterns poached from Atari-era digital design. A wall of printed panels, again in interior-decor-friendly muted tones, bear Coupland’s futuristic musings. The wall works are accompanied by three spire-shaped sculptures made of rings of lacquered maple, in Fisher-Price colours.
That’s the charming part. The unexpected, disarming element arrives on closer inspection.
