Paul Bourgault and Doug Guildford
at Edward Day Gallery
The Bourgaults are $3,500-$7,000. The Guildford etchings are $900-$2,200. Until July 10, 952 Queen St. W., Toronto; 416-921-6540
The paintings of Montreal artist Paul Bourgault are continually seductive and deeply satisfying, even though he clearly works in a strange and unedifying way. His paintings are invariably poised just at the pivot point between convincing figuration and purely abstracted, non-representational forms. They are joyously, gleefully neither here nor there. It shouldn't work, but it does.
His shapes, for example, are almost pure shape -- but then you find in them a part figure, a length of landscape, some nearly recognizable thing. His colours, too, are almost pure colour -- but then you see that one of these bright, exuberantly painted, excerpted passages can turn into a shard of rock, a flow of lava, a sluicing of water, a bright cloud or a sample of sky.
The paintings seem to be patchwork quilts of coloured events, and yet, as you stand looking at them, their wildly disparate parts suddenly soften and flow seamlessly together. Each of Bourgault's paintings is a compendium of ifs and oughts and what-ifs and supposings. This ought to be disastrous. It ought to look tentative, wary, imprecise, uncommitted, schizophrenic, and unresolved. Instead, it looks fluid, vital and transformative. It's a mystery.
His exhibition, which is at Toronto's Edward Day Gallery, is called Saints, Guardians and Muses, and perhaps the pervasive mythological fragrance with which these exhilarating works are imbued has something to do with Bourgault's decision to construct an incident-tossed matrix for each painting -- a tumbling flow of pictorial events in which everything gets mixed up into a sort of gumbo of tumultuous meaning.
In Raise the Curtain, Cut the Net, for example, you can see in the middle of the painting an elongated arm, a stretched, elastic face, and in other parts of the painting passages that might constitute seas, skies, landforms, a rose, pillars, drapery, a grid, maybe an ancient, rudimentary city. You can feel (if you let yourself) the wind blowing, water surging, the sun baking down.
Yes, it's an impure, narrative-filled, possibly even sentimentalizing way to look at art. But it's intriguing and absorbing how dramatically Bourgault's paintings encourage such readings and stand up to them. It makes the paintings eccentric. But deliciously so.
Also at Edward Day is a small exhibition of recent etchings by award-winning Toronto (and summer Haligonian) printmaker Doug Guildford. Like much of his previous work, these exquisite etchings, mostly in a light seawater green, or algae-esque greenish-brown, are about delicate nautical forms in suspension: teeming planes of coiled and pulsing creature-like and plant-like things, sometimes densely packed. Viewing them is like looking into an aquarium full of creatures you've never ever seen before.
Richard Gorman
at the Christopher Cutts Gallery
$5,000 each. Until July 9, 21 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-532-5566
Veteran Toronto painter Richard Gorman began his long and successful career as a maker of wild, rough and stirringly memorable abstract paintings. They could be seen at Toronto's legendary Isaacs Gallery (now being honoured by a four-gallery celebration in Toronto) in the 1960s, when I hero-worshipped Gorman and the other painters in the Isaacs inner circle, Michael Snow, Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry, Dennis Burton, et al.
Then, after a long sojourn in abstraction, Gorman abruptly renewed himself with a long immersion in landscape painting. He even invented an alter-ego for himself: a painter named Jack Pine, who used to traverse the northern rivers in a canoe painted all over in a yellow-and-black checkerboard pattern. Gorman gradually refined the Landscape Idea in his paintings until he was left with only a single tree -- a solitary, mystical tree-of-life that he painted obsessively, and stirringly, for a decade.
Now, after all those glowing trees, Gorman is back to abstraction. And the truth is nobody can lay colour on a canvas quite the way Richard Gorman can. These new, small-scale paintings seem deceptively simple at first. Each of them appears to consist of two parts, a big sweep of ground colour and a smaller, frayed, contrasting, superimposed contrasting colour: blue on orange for October, purple on gold for tundra, and so on.
But of course it's not that easy. You have to look at them a long time to see how easy it isn't. The two colours change one another wherever they meet and touch. And it's hard, for example, to tell which colour covers which. What's on top? And as soon as you've pinned both colours into some sort of stability in your mind, they start to change -- they shove, they float, they twist and breathe. In the end, they perform -- and keep performing. It's a virtuoso achievement. But then we're talking here about a virtuoso painter.
Craig Porter at le.gallery
$350-$3,800. Closes tomorrow, 1183 Dundas St. W., Toronto;
416-532-8467
Sculptors are a beleaguered lot. Nobody much wants to make sculpture any more. Toronto artist Craig Porter does though -- and he makes it pretty much as if he doesn't know or (more likely) doesn't care what the stolid art of sculpture has been before his time.
His exhibition bears the stuttering, barely grammatical title Liars Have Need To Have Good Memory, and consists of devilishly clever, corrosively witty constructions, some of which stand on the floor, some of which lean against the wall, and some of which hang from the gallery ceiling. They're made of all kinds of stuff: cast toys (a dirigible, doll-house-scaled Louis XIV chests of drawers, toy sheep), model mountains from aquarium sets, cast chicken feet, cast walnuts, lots of precarious-looking scaffolding.
One major piece, called Maelstrom, a laboriously constructed tornado, ends up holding aloft a flock of cast sheep so dense it looks like a storm-cloud. In Hydra, a frighteningly proliferating flowering vine grows up the wall, its tendrils (which are made of paper, coated in beeswax and dipped "in a cinnamon essence") bursting into heavy damp-looking pods, which might well be carnivorous.
This work, like all of Porter's things, is an engagingly fresh look at the mythological roots of our culture. And like it, all of his other sculptures, wild, improbable and shamanistically intense, reference our ancient stories, incarnating them in gloriously madcap but strangely moving ways. Porter is a superb -- though waggish and irreverent -- storyteller, and his exhibition is utterly delightful.