Art Toronto 2024: Selections

CHARLES BIERK

BOBBIE BURGERS

STEVE DRISCOLL

Steve Driscoll brings forth a whole new layer of detail to the surface of these recent works, creating almost three-dimensional depictions of clouds floating in the sky or lily pads resting on water. Typically completing a painting in one stretch due to the time sensitive nature of his medium, oil pigments mixed with urethane,  Driscoll has also begun experimenting with working in two sittings. This allows him more time to work on the elements of his paintings which might have come toward the end of his process, and therefore would have been more tame to prevent the materials from reacting badly.

 

During a visit to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection's Tom Thomson exhibition, North Star, Driscoll found himself drawn to the unusual nature of Thomson's palette - gradients of minty greens and almost salmon-like oranges. This new tonal range is also visible in this new series of works.

In Big Pink / Ambrose Sky, Landon Mackenzie explores the idea of ‘Bewilderment’ and is the fifth work in a series where games of chance and aesthetic control are shared with time. As with a sister work, Rose Snow and Pink Sky (A universe for Carl Hart) in the Audain Art Museum, it employs a palimpsest of layering where networks and pathways dissolve as fast as one can be certain of them. 

 

Mackenzie reflects upon her own mother’s journey through the passage of time and multiple geographies where the ability to communicate outwardly is eventually lost and the mind, though still active, is mostly unreachable. Portals go in and out of focus in a picture that appears initially to be abstract, while a longer look reveals its figuration.

LINDA MARTINELLO

EMMANUEL OSAHOR

Emmanuel Osahor paints fictional gardenscapes. They are lush and appear slightly wild, but Osahor takes care to remind us they are manmade spaces: a fence, a birdbath, or a plastic chair punctures an otherwise seemingly natural landscape. Osahor’s gardens function as metaphorical spaces, filled with imagined foliage and conceptualised from collaged photographs taken by the artist of gardens he has visited. In his constructed edens, wispy brushstrokes of pinks and powdery greens, blues and dusted purples, are punctuated by small and focused strokes of contrasting richer tones that create pockets of energy. Osahor paints them as mirages rather than as real life spaces: they are constantly just out of reach and appear as though they might melt away before our eyes, as quickly as they seem to have risen from the earth. In Osahor’s works the garden is transformed into a space for respite, a place within which the desire for utopia can be discussed, bringing forward the complexities of hope and failure that are inherent in utopic imagining.

NED PRATT

In his latest body of work, Ben Reeves constructs landscapes filled with a sense of leisure found in the Canadian outdoors: windsurfing, paddleboarding, sailing, skiing and skating. His gesturally painted vignettes are perpetually sun-kissed and invite us to recall our own fond memories of similar activities with their intense pink, blue and yellow hues.

 

 The title of his September exhibition, Yacht Rock, was derived from the genre of music synonymous with the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Toto and Canada’s own Gordon Lightfoot. Its discography includes much-loved anthems like “Long Train Runnin’” and “Hold the Line”, songs suffused with a 70s-80s ethos of prosperity and escapism. The music that fills a yacht rock playlist is catchy, idyllic, and highly produced.

 

Reeves’ paintings are similarly utopian, and in turn, they call out their own production. Reeves is acutely aware that landscape painting as a genre relies on the construction of an ideal, romanticised place rather than a mimetic representation of reality. His impastoed surfaces that simultaneously describe realistic subjects while revealing the physicality of the medium itself, allude to this paradox.

TONY SCHERMAN

Adopting the difficult medium of encaustic painting early on in a career that spanned over five decades, Tony Scherman was lauded for his remarkable facility with the ancient medium and for positioning it firmly within the context of contemporary art. The dynamic process involves mixing melted wax with oil paint and applying it rapidly onto a dry surface in layers. Scherman’s signature approach began with a beige ground to which he added colour, continually building up and burning away the wax to leave light trapped within the surface. 

JOHN SCOTT

Legendary Canadian artist John Scott's fervent, raw-edged paintings provided social commentary on capitalism, politics, war, and human nature. Thick with counter culture aesthetics, Scott's work is doused in fear and anxiety. By using messy, deep black charcoal to create repeated motifs like bunnies and dark commanders, Scott lends his works a particularly ominous quality.

 

Scott was also renowned for his machine-hybrid sculptures. Trans-Am Apocalypse, 1993, is a black-painted Pontiac Trans-Am with biblical scripture from the Book of Revelations etched obsessively onto its surface. The work now lives in the National Gallery of Canada's permanent collection and a second version is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. John Scott: Firestorm, a major exhibition curated by John O'Brian that is dedicated to Scott's work on mechanical inventions of mankind, both military and civilian, will open at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Winter 2024.