Ramon Serrano
At Corkin Shopland Gallery
$575-$9,500. Until March 26,
55 Mill St., Building 61, Toronto;
416-979-1980.
The way Ramon Serrano paints it, the Hotel Habana Libre in downtown Havana is a gigantic modernist chimera of a building, huge and grey like a dirty iceberg.
In the installation of his spectral Hotel Habana Libre paintings, opening today at Toronto's Corkin Shopland Gallery (his first solo North American exhibition), Serrano's images are huddled together like persistent visions from a dream that will not end. Taken together, the paintings form a ghostly and imagistically relentless environment in which the hotel's anatomization at the painter's hands in no way helps to defuse or deconstruct its sinister force as an oppressive image.
It does, however, serve to amplify the hotel's historic meaning for the Cuban people. "No matter where you are in Havana," Serrano tells me, "you can see the hotel. It will not go away."
What will also not go away is the building's inner social and political narrative. It began its life, in the early 1950s, as a Hilton hotel, a bastion of bourgeois privilege and an emblem of class consciousness in Cuba.
During the first triumphant days of the revolution, in 1959, Fidel Castro commandeered the hotel, turning it into his seat of government and renaming it Hotel Habana Libre. Now, having come full circle, the building is once again a middle-class tourist hotel, from which, Serrano notes bitterly, ordinary Cubans are barred.
In so obsessively and sumptuously painting this hulking structure, Serrano -- who, at 37, is not only a prodigiously gifted artist, but is also the dean of the Instituto Superior De Arte at the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba -- is clearly working out something that is both central to his own sensibility and pivotal to Cuban culture. The way Serrano paints the hotel betrays the fact that the project began with his black-and-white photographs of the place -- all those silvery greys and velvety blacks. Also characteristic of the photos, and unusual in architectural renderings, is the fact that Serrano has actually painted his images of the hotel as if they were a series of double-exposures: The building's edges shimmer and overlap, repeat themselves nearby, elide one another, and extend themselves meaninglessly into the surrounding space. The building, in Serrano's hands, is impossible to bring into focus.
Serrano's project is called LO QUE SE VE ES LO QUE SE VE -- What You See is What You See. But what you see is insubstantial, optically diffuse, a sort of gridded, modernist mirage. Rendering the Hotel Habana Libre graphically imprecise defeats most of the documentary information the paintings might have been expected to convey and works instead to replace the historic with the mythic.
And everybody knows that myth is infinitely more forceful than history.
Dominique Toutant at Gallery 1313
Prices on request. Until Feb. 13, 1313 Queen St. W., Toronto;
416-536-6778
Montreal-based artist Dominique Toutant clearly had a wonderfully waggish time devising his boutique, a witty and, despite its sustained irreverence, compellingly attractive installation of the art-derived products he supplies to his own personal Museum Gift Shop.
Gaily suspecting that a meaningful part of any viewer's visit to a museum is a stop at the gift boutique, Toutant has fabricated a number of charming, trinket-like objects, each of them derived, in witty and inventive ways, from indisputably important works of international art.
There is a row of life-size felt jackets, for example, with the word "Beuys" applied to the front in melted wax, an allusion to the great German artist-shaman Joseph Beuys's obsession, in his work, with both felt and wax.
There is a display of Carl Andre key chains -- an installation of the American minimalist sculptor's trademark squares of steel on the gallery floor -- but with a key chain's shiny metal loop attached to the corner of each one, thus hopelessly contravening Andre's dumb-ox purity. And there is a stunningly handsome gathering on the floor of 200 generic, white ceramic coffee cups, arranged in the relentlessly logical manner of artist Sol Lewitt.
My favourite of Toutant's wicked souvenir allusions is his Kapoor Plates -- a sculpture-like stack of 30 brilliantly red dinner plates, for which, as a homage or perhaps anti-homage to art superstar Anish Kapoor and the deep, saturated colour with which he has always ignited his sculptures, Toutant has given a searingly red finish consisting of powdered Naphtol Red pigment over a base of the drywall plaster with which the plates have been coated.
Parody or not, this stack of red plates is a superb sculpture on its own -- with or without its Kapoor-ish allusions -- and is indisputably the reddest object in town. Bring your shades.