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Rewind: Gertrude Kearns

Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto

Part of the power of Gertrude Kearns’s UNdone: Dallaire/Rwanda paintings is generated from their being painted on commercially available nylon canvas pre-printed with a rust-brown/dark-brown camouflage design.

The paintings, for the most part very large, offer a sustained meditation on the meaning of the appalling 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which more than 800,000 Tutsis were massacred by militant Hutus. More particularly, they are also an exploration of the role of Canadian General Roméo Dallaire (now retired), commander of the tiny and hopelessly compromised UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda. Thus the excoriating UN-pun of the show’s title, which enfolds within it both the United Nations’ culpability in the disaster and Dallaire’s having become emotionally undone by the experience: his earlier warnings to the UN of the inevitable carnage of the coming conflict having been resolutely ignored, the general and his troops were forced to look on helplessly as men, women and children were indiscriminately slaughtered before their horrified eyes (“…over there I had met the devil personally,” Dallaire said in an interview).

Given Kearns’s deployment of the camouflage canvases, it is helpful to recall that the word camouflage (from the French verb “camoufler”) means both to blind and to veil.

Six of the paintings in UNdone are portraits of Dallaire. They are powerful pictures, albeit rather crudely drawn. The best of them, Dallaire #6, a large head-and-shoulders study, shows the beleaguered general burying his face in his hands. Kearns’s camouflage canvas acts as veiling—protection for a man already flayed by the outrageous events to which he was a witness. Here, the matrix of camouflaging is scrim-like, admitting of a slow, gradually additive view of the subject, a membrane-like field on which the general’s portrait appears piecemeal, hesitantly, wrenchingly.

When Kearns turns from the Dallaire portraits to limn the horrors of the Rwanda genocide at large, however, her camouflaging material turns into an agency of blinding, not veiling. In the vast Mission: Camouflage (approximately 10 feet by 15 feet), the events in the picture—the wheels of an almost life-size UN truck parked across the upper part of the canvas frame a scene of devastating carnage—are so anguishing it is the viewer that the camouflaging ends up protecting. The distancing, retardant camouflaging field allows—forces—Kearns to pick her way into the painting, seizing upon the puzzle-like pixels of its patterning as both shapes to be expanded into figurative shards (a single camouflage patch will suggest the heel of a fallen figure, or the finger of an outstretched hand) and shapes to be deliberately, mercifully obfuscated (anger is as blinding as love). We come upon them slowly, inexorably, as reconstruction, disbelief, revulsion, deepening outrage—rather in the way the rest of the world did. In these beautiful, terrible paintings, camouflage is deception, both optically and psychologically. It is at once both protection and proclamation.

Spring 2003

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