Marion Wagschal retrospective shows paintings saturated with time

Photography presents its view of reality one split-second at a time. A painter can represent time in a much more elastic fashion, as Marion Wagschal shows in her terrific current retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Wagschal, who has been painting in Montreal for five decades, makes memory objects that mostly take the form of large-scale portraits, often of family and friends. Some appear to have been painted from life, others from the imagination, but all feel saturated with time, as a duration that weighs on her subjects and her experience of them.

Her figures are often nude, probably because nothing in human life registers time’s passing as accurately as the flesh. Her bodies, middle-aged or older, sag and bulge and show postures worn into the bones. Their feet and hands have been moulded by activity, while their faces often have the vacant look of people at rest in familiar domestic spaces. Many of her subjects sprawl on beds or couches or sink into easy chairs.

The elderly pair in Couple with a Calico Cat (1988) lie naked on their bed, touching without purpose at elbows and knees, empty teacups by their feet and a grandchild’s drawing on the wall. They wear their long intimacy like an old garment, frayed or threadbare but well accustomed. Portraits often prompt us to imagine we can read character in the image, but this one doesn’t. The couple is exposed but also hidden, except perhaps to the painter, a friend who gives us an unexplained glimpse of her private dialogue with them.

In Wagschal’s nude self-portrait Cyclops (1978), she stands at her easel, eyeing the mirror that is us with one arm raised to her canvas, her body showing what artist Joyce Wieland used to call “the marks of time on the meat.” For Wagschal, as with painter Lucian Freud, there’s no usable truth in an idealized image and no need for anything like photographic accuracy. Her canvases in oils and acrylics show all the process of their making, in daubs of colour and firmly drawn outlines.

In Cyclorama (1988), periods of time overlap in a fantasia of self-portraits and images dreamt or remembered. On the left side of the canvas, Wagschal appears as a bride whose dress sheds jewels like tears; on the other, she’s a nude on horseback. A geisha wears a costume patterned in maple leaves, a gowned woman walks with a fetus visible in her womb, and a skull-faced Pierrot plays a guitar. The scene feels like a dream about carnival in a tropical place – Trinidad, perhaps, where Wagschal lived till the age of nine. Time in this painting is like an accordion that can expand and collapse, bringing different periods and realities into sudden proximity.

Masks in Wagschal’s paintings are the antithesis of the nude figure, though nudes often wear them. Her favourite is the beaked zanni mask of commedia dell’arte, which two men wear in the sinister grouping Dottore (2009), the name of which also alludes to the bird-like mask of the medieval plague doctor. In the foreground of a room crowded with seated nudes, a man in apparent distress is attended by these two clothed zanni, who don’t look at all benevolent. A German shepherd sitting in someone’s lap may be a clue that this is an allegory of the evils practised by some doctors during the Holocaust, which Wagschal’s parents escaped and which haunts her paintings in many ways. But the painting also radiates something timelessly malign, as in the “black” paintings of Goya, an artist directly referenced in Wagschal’s Rituals of Self-Possession series of 1991.

In The Melancholy of Carnivores, completed last year, a fox stands upright near two seated or squatting nudes. One is masked and has claw-like hands and animal teeth, and the other has a hairless lion’s tail. Wagschal’s soft palette and daubed brushwork make it hard to distinguish flesh from surroundings, though the reality under this cloud-like technique feels hard as stone. It’s hard not to see it as a nightmare image of the slippery realities underpinning the neat rules and distinctions of civilization.

Wagschal uses the same cloud-like style in Trim (2012), a portrait of an elderly man in a wheelchair, his upper body nearly lost in the texture of the cloth thrown over his shoulders for his haircut. His eyes are as unfocused as knots in piece of wood. A stern-looking woman stands behind him with the scissors near his throat – an allusion, perhaps, to another of Goya’s “black” paintings, The Fates. If there’s harshness here it’s in the reality depicted, which is that of Wagschal’s brother, suffering from Parkinson’s disease in a hospice.

Women and especially the figure of the mother are powerful in Wagschal’s art. In The Great Coat (1987), which features the same pair as in Couple with a Calico Cat, the woman stands in the middle of the canvas, glaring in three-quarter pose, a hand on her hip, wearing purple to the ankles, like a Renaissance prince. Her husband is fused into his soft chair, a book in his lap and an empty plate at his feet, while two boys occupy themselves with snacks and hobbies.

In Tales from the Schwarzwald as told by my Mother, a grid of painted framed snapshots radiates from a central small image of a woman with lowered eyes. The bottom of the canvas is heaped with dolls, and at least two skeletons float over the top, which is also decorated with flowers. The whole array, which Wagschal took 33 years to complete, is a memory lattice for her mother’s recollection of what vanished in the Holocaust. Burning Spoons (1994), a similar apotheosis of a memory object, shows the only possession Wagschal’s mother brought from Europe, burning magically on a bed while mother and daughter lie on either side.

A haunted sense of darkness is apparent in many of these images, but Wagschal’s art can also have a celebratory feeling. Artists and Children (1988) shows fellow artist David Elliott, his wife, Elise Bernatchez, and their four children, mostly nude on a bed. Everything is foreground, with the parents framing the image from above and below. The spaces between the family are filled with toys, tea things and other items specific to them, or with floral and quilt patterns. The painting has the obsessive surface-filling energy of some outsider art, though the more direct link is with Wagschal’s lifelong affection for embroidery. The whole delightful image breathes an atmosphere of peaceful domestic leisure.

This astounding exhibition was curated by Sarah Fillmore and first seen last summer and fall at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, where the pieces on show numbered 43. Unfortunately the MMFA, which partnered the project, is showing only 30 – a pity, in that this is the first comprehensive display of Wagschal’s work in her hometown. You’ll have to buy the handsome catalogue to see the images that didn’t make the cut. Better yet, nag your local public gallery to take up this show, which in an ideal Canada would be touring the whole country.