Painter Harold Klunder's latest exhibition, opening today at Toronto's Sable-Castelli Gallery, is so good you have to take yourself seriously in hand and earnestly beat back the euphoria uncoiling in your vitals.
The work clearly deserves and indeed cries out for some sober and serious perusal -- and thus demands, in the viewer, a state of aesthetic alert scarcely consistent with swooning rapturously about the gallery.
All of the present paintings were made after the artist's moving, in July, 2000, from his studio in Flesherton, north of Toronto, to Montreal.
For Klunder, who tends normally to pile on the pigment and work it into depths and latherings of inexhaustible chromatic complexity, these new Montreal-engendered paintings are almost spare and lean.
"I felt the need to de-veil them," he says as we stroll around the gallery. He is quick to point out, as well, that he rather suspects that "de-veil" is not really a word at all. It will do nicely, though.
For Klunder, de-veiling the paintings means to "expose some of their content."
Expose some content as opposed to what? Concealing it? Well, yes, in a way. Take the two small tondo (disc-shaped) paintings -- a form entirely new to the artist.
The tondo is notoriously difficult to compose (no top or bottom, no left or right). Raphael managed it okay. And Ingres. Klunder's tondos spin like tops, with discreet, richly coloured shapes (pinks, blues, creams, greys) shaken free from the grounds over which they float, so that they mill about on the surface, restless and ambitious for some new sense of place.
Klunder's paintings have always been abstract, if not entirely non-representational (sometimes his coagulations of paint have heaved themselves into something resembling the artist's own face, for example).
Here, in these unstoppably gorgeous new works, recognizable -- or half-recognizable -- images pop up everywhere amid Klunder's paroxysms of pure painting.
In the great triptych, Sun and Moon -- which reminds, perhaps irrationally, of German painter Max Beckmann's stupendous triptych Departure from 1933 -- the shifting, melting, magma-like planes of colour drift with tectonic inexorability while here and there, in this ponderous gorgeousness, figures and events struggle up from the fray and tip their hats to you (check out the Picassoid figure in the left panel).
In the creamy, buttery Bonfire Night, fleshy pinks and molten reds support images and incidents the way you can see things if you stare into flames.
Klunder's colour is unlike anybody else's. What rushings of unashamed, full-throated hue are here set free! And the leaner and more reduced the paintings become -- the more de-veiled they are -- the more the colour becomes substance, and action, and presence all on its own.
Prices on request. Until March 12, 33 Hazelton Ave., Toronto; 416-961-0011.
Brian Burnett at Gallery One
Brian Burnett has always been a painter -- and a slathery, expressionist one at that. It may come as some surprise to his fans, then, that this new exhibition,
Wired Urban Birds, is entirely made up of large Giclee prints (photographic images ink-jetted onto soft water-colour paper) of his own digitally adjusted photographs.
Burnett's painterliness is amply incarnated, however, in these spectacular prints. All of them involve, as the show's name accurately indicates, birds perched on wires -- with attendant light standards, cables and transformers. All of this low-tech connectedness is twisted and distorted in the computer, and then bathed in the often lurid glow of spectacularly coloured backdrop skies, animated with whorls of dyed cloud-cover.
The birds, sparrows for the most part, are usually encased in bubble-like envelopes that float adjacent to the baroque tangle of wires and cables and bolted steel fixtures that twist and thrust through the pictures. It's as if they need protecting, somehow, from the sizzling juiciness of the electro-environment that has become their metropolitan home.
But Burnett's electro-scapes are, in the long run, more scenic than cynic. In the beautiful Power Tree, a dark bird (a starling?) on a snow-covered branch, bears witness, from a safe distance, to an upward surge of cables so forceful it seems to have generated the picture's searing red-orange background from its leftover energy.
Power and Dreams, by contrast, a placid sparrow, resigned to living inside a mirrored sphere, looks out onto complex, pickled blue-steel fixtures, standing against a skyline now tipped up into strident verticality.
All of the prints are remarkably, almost indecently, lush. And what is so great is the way their lushness still leaves room for meaning -- which seems to hover around ideas about the profound adjustments nature and technology require of one another wherever they come together. $750-$3,000. Until Feb. 28, 121 Scollard St., Toronto; 416-929-3103.