Rewind: Gary Spearin
Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa
Toying with the conundrums dividing abstract from non-representational painting, Gary Spearin works from the assumption that viewers read paintings through their own world view, regardless of the artist's intentions. As such, he paints in an ostensibly formalist mode determined by referents and rules established by the project itself.
In a departure from 20th-century strategies (in particular Clement Greenberg's tenets of flatness and patterning), each painting sculpts optical depth in a flurry of manneristic, old-school fan brushwork that does not lock into an image-making process. With counterpointing devices of warm colour into cool and fresh paint brushed into prior paint, Spearin creates a complex weave of organic shapes on human-scaled canvases. His painterly language consists of small brush markings, intense colour modelling and theatrical figure/ground interplay.
Spearin refuses to capitulate to the modernist paradigm wherein works remain Untitled. Instead, he presents his entire project under the banner "NAME PAINTINGS" and coyly shifts the task of constructing meaning to the viewer. In so doing, Spearin uses the naming process as a conceptual framing device, hence works are titled Insert Name Here, Name Within, Naming Names and Name Calling, to name only a few.
It is an interesting strategy that points to a hybrid path beyond the familiar discourse of modernism versus postmodernism. While producing non-representational work seemingly laden with a self-referential painterly program, Spearin respects the authority of the viewer—he initiates a semiotic dance in which viewers are fully encouraged to freestyle along other interpretive paths.
With that brushwork, colour and figure/ground interplay constructing an emotional shorthand, the installation of works on the gallery walls suggests the writing of visual sentences, where larger works read as nouns and verbs and smaller paintings as adjectives, adverbs or connectives. The strength of Spearin's project is that, more than most painters, he extends his visual vocabularies into installational conversations. He assembles painterly phrases and a grammar for them within his project. Narrative references, if any are to be found, are left to the poetic imagination and pleasure of viewers. And that is where the fun begins.
Summer 2004
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