Murray Whyte, Toronto Star, November 22, 2014
Full review available here.
[...]
“Painting Hamilton,” as you might guess, groups together about a dozen local painters, crossing generational lines with the simple goal of declaring the practice alive and well in Steeltown.
This is partly due, no doubt, to the rising costs of neighbouring Toronto, which has been driving artists farther afield in search of cheap rent for a decade now or more. Daniel Hutchinson, to name one, whose clever, gorgeously methodical dark abstractions are part of the show, is firmly entrenched in the Toronto scene.
But still, there's something to be said for a local gallery doing something unabashedly local, even as a segment of its gallery space is given over to a traveling blue-chip road show. Works at Painting Hamilton don't share much beyond a medium, but there are treasures to be found here. Hutchinson's Paintings for Electric Light are seductive and smart, deploying fluorescent tubes — in one case, arrayed sculpturally a la Dan Flavin — to play off his textured, iridescent canvases.
It's a good play, and pokes a little at the goings-on next door, given that representational painting's chief goal is the rendering of light itself. Abstraction not so much — that's why it's abstract — and that bit of formal tension adds layers to the work. Other painters, meanwhile, do engage with light in that conventional way, showing how hard it can be, and how arresting when done well.
Look no further than Catherine Gibbon, whose explosive, visceral landscapes blow out everything but the register of fiery oranges and yellows. Gibbon's pictures are huge, billowing with smoke for a world aflame, but size matters in more ways than one.
Matthew Schofield knows this, and his selection of works here number in the dozens. They are, however, tiny, painted as direct translations from snapshots to same-size canvases.
Here, the affinity with Cézanne's proto-modern ilk emerges and turns upside down. No, really: Just as Post-Impressionism emerged in part as a reaction to photography, licentiously meaning to capture a world less as it was than as it felt, Schofield works in reverse, recapturing from the actual a moody realm of artistic intent.
The scale is self-conscious and spot-on, pulling the viewer close. He's not the first to do it, here or elsewhere (see: Mike Bayne). But rendering throwaway snapshots with the loving physicality of painting by hand confers a darkness and humanity to their otherwise unassuming, homespun warmth.
You might even say that painting can create a world beyond what the eye can see — something Cézanne and company knew well enough to start, and 150 years later, shows no end in sight.
The World is an Apple and Painting Hamilton continue at the Art Gallery of Hamilton to Feb. 8.
Full review available here.
[...]
“Painting Hamilton,” as you might guess, groups together about a dozen local painters, crossing generational lines with the simple goal of declaring the practice alive and well in Steeltown.
This is partly due, no doubt, to the rising costs of neighbouring Toronto, which has been driving artists farther afield in search of cheap rent for a decade now or more. Daniel Hutchinson, to name one, whose clever, gorgeously methodical dark abstractions are part of the show, is firmly entrenched in the Toronto scene.
But still, there's something to be said for a local gallery doing something unabashedly local, even as a segment of its gallery space is given over to a traveling blue-chip road show. Works at Painting Hamilton don't share much beyond a medium, but there are treasures to be found here. Hutchinson's Paintings for Electric Light are seductive and smart, deploying fluorescent tubes — in one case, arrayed sculpturally a la Dan Flavin — to play off his textured, iridescent canvases.
It's a good play, and pokes a little at the goings-on next door, given that representational painting's chief goal is the rendering of light itself. Abstraction not so much — that's why it's abstract — and that bit of formal tension adds layers to the work. Other painters, meanwhile, do engage with light in that conventional way, showing how hard it can be, and how arresting when done well.
Look no further than Catherine Gibbon, whose explosive, visceral landscapes blow out everything but the register of fiery oranges and yellows. Gibbon's pictures are huge, billowing with smoke for a world aflame, but size matters in more ways than one.
Matthew Schofield knows this, and his selection of works here number in the dozens. They are, however, tiny, painted as direct translations from snapshots to same-size canvases.
Here, the affinity with Cézanne's proto-modern ilk emerges and turns upside down. No, really: Just as Post-Impressionism emerged in part as a reaction to photography, licentiously meaning to capture a world less as it was than as it felt, Schofield works in reverse, recapturing from the actual a moody realm of artistic intent.
The scale is self-conscious and spot-on, pulling the viewer close. He's not the first to do it, here or elsewhere (see: Mike Bayne). But rendering throwaway snapshots with the loving physicality of painting by hand confers a darkness and humanity to their otherwise unassuming, homespun warmth.
You might even say that painting can create a world beyond what the eye can see — something Cézanne and company knew well enough to start, and 150 years later, shows no end in sight.
The World is an Apple and Painting Hamilton continue at the Art Gallery of Hamilton to Feb. 8.
