Rewind: John Eisler
Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary
John Eisler is a visual DJ. He circulates and recirculates colours, gestures and forms from the digital visual world in cuts, samples and cross-fades across ultra-slick finished surfaces. In "Per Second Per Second," his exhibition of new paintings at Paul Kuhn Gallery (the title can be found within a line from James Joyce's Ulysses), the prolific Eisler presented 15 new paintings and a series of drawings that created a lively noise of visual hooks and beats.
The predominantly horizontal orientation of Eisler's large paintings brings to mind a view from a fast-moving train screaming across a digitized landscape. Everything flits by. Eisler arrests the digital flow in a poly-rhythmic perversity of geometric forms and striations. But his digital landscapes are generic ones. There are no cells, conduits, computer chips or images from the 24-hour news cycle here, but rather a collection of chimerical, Tron-like vistas. It is this generic starting point that, despite Eisler's technical dexterity, threatens to give rise to an overall visual sameness. His long and narrow Exatense, which resembles some of his earlier work, is a case in point: the distinctive streaks come close to seeming simply repetitive. Credit is due to Eisler for appearing ever aware of a potential slide into a rote rut or a mere deluxe-graphic sensibility.
In two previous installations at the Art Gallery of Calgary, Eisler constructed complex floor-to-ceiling environments that transformed and magnified the impact of individual works. In the large Vocode paintings in the new exhibition, Eisler has introduced a productive foil directly into the works themselves: exploding geometric shapes cut across the surface above and beneath Exatense-like stripes and blocks. These shattered shapes set up refreshingly unruly counter-rhythms and channel Eisler's penchant for all-over left-to-right gesturalism into a more complex pictorial kineticism that makes his earlier work seem static in contrast.
The virtual colours that new reproduction technologies have brought along with them—electric greens, luminous yellows and glimmering violets—make up Eisler's natural palette. The colour variations found upon his painted and smoothly sanded planes—one atop the other atop another—could not be achieved by digital means alone. Eisler comes off as more a colourizer than a colourist. He deploys colour within his own eye-popping programming language and then parlays these codes into infinite variations. For Eisler, colour and technique are codes taken for wonders.
Despite their technical bravura and predilection for high-keyed colours, Eisler's paintings are filled with remarkable subtleties that encourage us to see much more than the basic pictorial architecture. His digital licks could easily have become tropes for simply illustrating, rather than creating, visual motion. Instead, Eisler manages to be the interlocutor, and not just the translator, of the digital visual flow. Winter 2004
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