William Ronald at
Christopher Cutts Gallery
$12,500-$80,000. Until March 29, 21 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-532-5566
It took me by surprise that this exhibition, William Ronald 1926-1998, now at Toronto's Christopher Cutts Gallery, was mounted as a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the painter's death. It's been 10 years? Ronald was always larger than life. It's hard to believe he's not still around somewhere, flailing paint in all directions and carrying on like a madman.
Born William Ronald Smith (both Ronald and his brother, painter John Meredith, dropped the "Smith," which they considered insufficiently interesting for an artist's name), Ronald was founder, in 1953, of Canada's first group of abstract painters, Painters Eleven (members included Jack Bush, Harold Town and Kazuo Nakamura).
He left Toronto for New York in 1955, showing at the prestigious Kootz Gallery, where he was caught up in the maelstrom of abstract-expressionism and counted painters like Mark Rothko and Franz Kline as friends.
More or less defeated by the shift in the late 1950s from gestural abstract painting to pop art, optical art and minimal art - styles to which he was wildly unsuited - Ronald returned to Toronto in 1965, painted some unsatisfactory hard-edge paintings (like Two Nudes from 1962, in the current show), and gradually took up, once again, the kind of painting he could do supremely well - of which Dream from 1985, reproduced here, is a stirring example.
There are some really great Ronalds here: there's Diana's Window (1978), a kind of homage to Matisse (with Ronald's frequent, indeed almost trademark use of a peripherally painted "frame" acting as a window through which is revealed a landscape-like field of pastoral blues and greens) that comes on like a Jack Bush with some juice. And the exciting Homecoming (Lindberg 1926) from 1973 - a square, heavily-laden slab of congested knots and gnarlings of oil paint straight from the tube, that actually evokes a ticker-tape parade in full precipitation. And that big, untitled, cyclonic, inchoate explosion of redness-blueness that is Ronald's very last painting before his death (what a finale!). And there is a superb Ronald from 1978, Lady Day's Gardenia, built like Diana's Window on the Ronald inner "frame" which, in this case, is made to support a handful of upward flingings of heavy white paint - tears, flower stems, bolts of energy - pattering insistently against the mostly pink canvas. It's a wonderful painting and it was made by the kind of painter they don't make any more.
Ronald was a gifted and prolific watercolorist, and there are eight watercolours in the exhibition made from 1955 to 1964. Some of them are early and a bit tentative. Most, like an untitled work from 1961 in the north gallery, glow like molten metal.
Dream seems to me a flawless painting of its kind (i.e. as abstract-expressionism goes). Here again is the Ronald frame - a band of whitish brick-like elements bordering the painting. Inside it, against a field of alternating red and white horizontal stripes, floats a big bladder- or lung-like shape, within which hangs a deep-black organ-like object. Everything in the painting is utterly clarified, open and fully declared. And ecstatically guileless in its grandeur.
Mara Korkola at Nicholas Metivier Gallery
$1,500-$6,800. Until March 1,
451 King St. W., Toronto; 416-205-9000
Although Toronto-based artist Mara Korkola is clearly a greatly gifted painter, I find the welter of stupefyingly similar little oil paintings on aluminum that take up most of the gallery's exhibition space - all of them part of a series called No Place - far too formulaic. It seems to me I've seen these paintings - which are dots of bright pigment on black grounds (the lights of a city reflected in wet streets) - a number of times before.
But the paintings in the back gallery are another story - and a much better story, too. This series, also small oils on aluminum, bears the overall title Winter Was Hard (the title of a famous album by the Kronos Quartet), and is about winter light and snowy uneventfulness - specifically, the bleak, undifferentiated pearlescence that is the all-pervasive hue of an airport in winter. Runways are just barely landscapes, but Korkola gives them an otherwise overlooked presence and character, daubing in light standards, snowbanks, snowplows, fuel trucks, distant utility buildings, receding roadways, a faraway city skyline - all bathed in a frigid, silvery ambience. The difference between the No Place paintings and the Winter Was Hard paintings is profound. The former are unspecific, generic, and without context. The latter - despite their seeming emptiness, teem with incident. And by so minutely and exquisitely attending to those incidents, Korkola gives her airport paintings a roundness and believability that makes the wet nocturnal cityscapes into a clever painterly game by comparison.
Holger Kalberg at the Monte Clark Gallery
$1,500-$8,000. Until March 23,
55 Mill St., Building No. 2, Toronto; 416-703-1700
Vancouver-based artist Holger Kalberg calls his new exhibition of paintings and watercolours Neubau ("new construction"), and indeed these sumptuous seem , like his previous paintings, to be substantially drawn from the built environment, the constructed world - and as much informed by architecture and design as by any sense of painterly abstraction.
However, it is instructive to look at them again and see how their bright planes of colour - frequently set onto his canvases at sheer angles - intersect, clash and scrape themselves into configurations that often seem to refer as much to the organizational ploys of second-generation cubists (Gleizes, Metzinger and so on) as they do to the fierce angling and splintering of the experiments of the so-called "deconstructivist" architects - such as Zaha Hadid (and Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind).
In fact, Kalberg locates his exciting new paintings (oils on canvas and watercolours on polypropylene) as morphologically informed abstractions, where the rushing, rubbing, intersecting elements seem equally at the point of coming together as flying apart into discrete, abstract configurations. The paintings, though they cleave to the same sets of procedural conditions, vary greatly in format. Some, like Silver Lake and Bayside offer a vertical-horizontal orderliness - albeit with the erasing and rubbing and overpainting that makes all of Kalberg's surfaces such a delight. Others, like the bucking and plunging Module I and Module 2, and the edgy Lobot and Kamino, rush across the canvases like echoes of Italian futurist paintings from a century ago - bristling with gleeful news about the wonders of motion and the triumph of speed.