Rewind: Richard Halliday
Lehmann Leskiw + Schedler Fine Art, Toronto
It's so persistent. The personality of oil paint. There's nothing quite like it, and the closer we get to a dematerialized digital realm, the more we're going to need it.
This is what handling paint as a magical fetish object looks like—a diagram of seeing pictorial space as an extension of the painter's mind. Each of the large black-and-white canvases in Richard Halliday's series Constellation says one thing in a calm visual voice: this is how the mind of a painter works. Halliday's works are gestures in the dark, obscure visual signals that seem to evoke one of Frank Stella's favourite adages: what you see is what you see. Like all sophisticated exercises in seeing, they also invite us to forget the name of what we see.
At first glance, the paintings appear spontaneous, but craft and design have been applied to their random calligraphy. This is especially true of an optical party like Constellation #17, a boldly visceral playground where words like interior and exterior, subject and object, self and other cease to have meaning. Sometimes we visit galleries looking for we know not what, only to be stopped in our tracks by work that is about exactly what we don't know we're looking for. Halliday's paintings are such works.
Naturally enough, no senior artist likes to be called a senior artist (Halliday graduated from the Emily Carr Institute back in 1963, when it was still called the Vancouver School of Art), but their survival is worth celebrating. Does Halliday make primeval painting or quantum painting, or both? Call it what you will, but look closely and carefully. Every so often, the art of painting gets renewed. Winter 2004
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