Rewind: David Elliott
Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, Montreal
When you first enter Instant Karma it works you like a pop song. And like most hits, the paintings speak of the ordinary in extraordinary terms, the normal stuff of life that affects us: work, the house, the kids, love, heartbreakthe everyday life into which the artist throws himself with an enthusiasm rare in a jaded age. Elliott throws himself into painting with the same gusto, having committed himself for almost 25 yearswithout regretto a body of work that has evolved, yet remained based in a stable personal vocabulary. In his work we sense not so much the critical eye as the oozings of a devotee.
The exhibition provides only a hint of the past: two paintings from the early 1980s and Sound System (for Ashley) from 1995. Yet in these we find the elements and spirit of the new work that forms the bulk of the show. Elliotts approach to collage, the inventory of images, the colour, paint application and soulfulness remain persistent if not insistent. Birds, cars, flowers, eyes, stars appear and reappear, shuffled into a new handthe painter serving as both the dealer and the player of this game. The works apparently loose mix of images, culled from remaindered picture books, illustrated textbooks and the like, float on the canvases, frozen in place by the artists intuitive decisions.
Looking at the monumental Green Parrot (20012) we see (not surprisingly) a giant parrot surrounded by collaged images of an airplane, a key, a heart, a lit match and more. We want to make a story out of this congregation, but it goes nowhere. Rather, our eyes wander amongst the images, turning in circles like some kind of perpetual-motion machine. Here is where Elliotts work gets complicated and more interesting. While he uses very readable, even sentimental imagery, the canvases are relatively formal experiences. The dynamics of the collaged elements become pawns in a formal strategy to excite the eye. Split Flower (2002) becomes a series of popping retinal events: the optical dots in the background, the insane chroma of an immense flower overlaid with a peculiar blue car sitting below an image of an orange. The urge to read the images is secondary to the rush of colours and shapes. A story is no longer the point. This is a theatre in which the viewers own thoughts unfold.
Elliott is not alone in this territory. Others like James Rosenquist or David Salle have fused pop imagery, collage and large format into paintings with strong formal affect. However they often use culturally loaded material; Rosenquist might monumentalize a consumer product or Salle the provocative pose of a nude woman. Elliott chooses imagery from an ambiguous past that floats in an off-loaded cultural zone. His challenge is to supercharge this stuff back into existence, to make a painting sing from the bargain basement of our lives. It is not easy and you sense a struggle. The clamorous activity sometimes seems a cover for the moody stillness that is the after-effect of these works. Like a pause after a wailing power chord, the silence is all the more poignant.
Winter 2002
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