Scott Waters at LE Gallery
$100-$3,850. Until June 28,
1183 Dundas St. W., Toronto; 416-532-8467
The horror of war has always been a venerable subject in art (Uccello, Goya, Manet, Picasso, Anselm Kiefer, Nancy Spero). But after the Second World War - the last conflict in which the enemy seemed unambiguously located - the meaning of military strife gradually lost point and focus.
War has inexorably frayed into a condition of ongoing discord that is increasingly hard to locate and, therefore, hard to depict and to understand. The work of contemporary war artists - as a look at the Canadian War Museum's current travelling exhibition, A Brush With War (now at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection) can make clear - has changed markedly from the war art of the past. That change has come to lie, principally, as historian Dr. Laura Brandon of the Canadian War Museum points out in her Brush With War catalogue essay, in the artists' "personal, or subjective engagement in their compositions," engagements that "have sometimes challenged official or more widely held expectations that military art was, or ought to be, essentially objective."
Given the clean, exceedingly precise detailing of the war paintings of Toronto-based artist Scott Waters - whose work is included in A Brush With War, and whose solo exhibition, Trading Greens for Tans, is now at Toronto's LE Gallery - you could scarcely accuse the artist of a lack of objectivity in his painting. Rather, you get the feeling that he sees, with an almost frightening, hallucinatory clarity, precisely what is there before him. His work - as his anti-heroic Deer in the Headlights (The Seemingly Obligatory CFAP Self-Portrait) uncomfortably demonstrates - is an uncompromising examination of who modern soldiers are, what they are like, and what they do.
Waters went into the infantry right out of high-school, after which he immersed himself in the acquiring of a sophisticated art education, and then re-inserted himself into the military, via the Canadian Forces Artist Program (CFAP), with India Company, Second Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment. His chief interest in this often rather gruelling experience revolved, he writes in his artist's statement, "around the utopic; how the military, with its own rules and priorities, attempts to create an ideal society, one that though unachievable, nonetheless seeks its own form of perfection. That this is a perfection of violence," Waters continues, "is secondary to the attempt to create something that doesn't take the accepted (civilian) order for granted."
The paintings that make up Trading Greens for Tans are of two kinds: close-up, anecdotal inspections of the passing moment, telling vignettes that, in the act of transformation from photograph to fleshed-out painting, linger through that procedural time in which the banal moment can perhaps be elevated, by painting, into epiphany. Waters' acutely observed, sharply realized paintings show his fellow soldiers dozing, picking at Chinese takeout, waiting for something to happen. The other series of paintings are Waters's Nocturnes. Here is the artist on his velvety night skies, punctuated by explosions of light: "On night attacks (and that's all India did while I was with them) you can't use a flash, or if you do then the training becomes a film shoot - aesthetics trumping tactics and soldiers becoming models."
And that's where a great part of the paradoxical brilliance of Waters's exhibition lies: in the carefully studied way he allows soldiers to be soldiers and flare-filled night skies to be night skies, all the while working to lift everything he sees into the realm of the iconic.
Howard Podeswa
at Peak Gallery
$2,700-$7,600. Until June 27,
23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108
After intense and prolonged sojourns in the painterly deconstructing and examination - in study after study, painting after painting - of Velasquez's Las Meninas and Rembrandt's The Night Watch, Howard Podeswa has now stepped back a little from his relentless and inspired anatomizing of these two inexhaustible masterworks to re-insert himself into the workings of his own art, now juxtaposed to and nourished by some of the monuments of art history.
This melding of past and present takes the form, in his exhibition titled Caravaggio Breakfast, of Podeswa extending his gaze from the windows of his new downtown Toronto studio all the way back to the terrain of some of the painters he admires from the past (Caravaggio, Goya, Rubens, Pissarro, Edward Hopper), and generating an array of cunningly hybridized paintings.
There is a tiny painting, for example ( Detail Autumn Landscape with View of Het Steen), which is a bit of peripheral landscape lying behind something important in a Rubens. There are exhilarating riffs in which Goya's late black paintings meet the rooftops of Duncan Street in Toronto. And, speaking of Goya, there is, in this engrossingly conceived and exquisitely managed exhibition, a real masterpiece of enlightened pastiche: Podeswa's From the Plains of San Isidoro - a green painting of a plain, viewed from far above, peopled with figures and made in such a way (with half of the painting nothing but empty greensward) that you'd think that Goya (whose painting lies at the heart of this new version) had paused to paint and then simply moved on.
Elizabeth McIntosh
at Goodwater
$2,000-$25,000. Until June 27, 234 Queen St. E., Toronto; 647-406-5052
Normally, Vancouver-based painter Elizabeth McIntosh makes chromatically vivid paintings on canvas, usually of interlocking triangles of saturated colour. But for this brash, highly inventive new exhibition, Cut Out, at the always challenging Goodwater gallery, she has eschewed the use of pigment and has opted for pinning up, on the gallery walls, huge rectangles of coloured photographic backdrop paper.
Simultaneously a gigantic collage and, in effect, a painting without paint, this big, materially insubstantial work seems to glory in the assertiveness of its own provisional fate. Oddly, the work looks like a lot of modernist paintings except that you can't quite seem to decide which ones. "I feel as if I'm trying to lasso something I can't catch," McIntosh told Goodwin. Which I'd say is all to the good.