Gutenberg Galaxy: Alex Colville: Return
Alex Colville: Return is the handsome catalogue to a substantial touring exhibition that appeared last summer at the University of Toronto Art Centre. The taciturn title, echoing Colville's own enigmas, makes us wonder to what one of our senior and more celebrated artists returns. Colville's public would be surprised by change, but nothing has disturbed his calm, if troubling, surfaces. The curator Tom Smart's unsurprising thesis is that Colville's paintings, drawings and serigraphs of the last decade hark back to what he experienced as a war artist in Europe. He sees four organizing themes arise from these 60-year-old memories: ordering, doubling, longing and mortality. Perhaps unintentionally, the title also asks us to think of Colville as being "back" on the art scene, ready for new critical scrutiny. But there is no return in either sense. Colville never abandoned concerns from the war years, nor is he any more or less worthy of critical attention. What we must assess is the value of consistency and repetition.
Colville habitually deploys aesthetic order as a prophylactic against the looming chaos of the human condition. The thematic and structural geometries of Surveyor (2001), for example, find their value in facing and resolving the potential for anarchy in our lives and in nature. One of the virtues of this exhibition—following the precedent set by Philip Fry's 1994 Colville retrospective in Montreal—was that we could follow the construction of the artist's material matrices in accompanying drawings. But here too is an instance of the crippling simplicity of the organization of both the exhibition and its catalogue, a closing off that denies Colville's import. The drawings are seen as preparatory and thus welded to their supposed destinations in finished works. It is difficult to compare drawings from different stages of the artist's career or to consider them independently. Only by moving back and forth can we see how much more complex his drawings have become since his studies for paintings such as Ocean Limited in the 1960s.
Smart begins his text with an evocation of what many feel attracted to in Colville's art: "a spectre that looks out….always the same presence, variously disguised to blend into the artistic camouflages of his different pictures." The mystery of the images and of Colville's ideas is routinely regularized in the catalogue commentary, the didactic panels and the layout of the exhibition. Black Cat, a serigraph from 1996, presents a feline playing with an architect's scale on one of Colville's working surfaces. The animal frolics in front of the artist; we see only Colville's torso and the upper part of his head. His eyes are prominent but his mouth is covered. Smart confidently asserts that "By obscuring the artist's mouth, Colville suggests the cat is the words he speaks.…the cat embodies the distinction between rational and animal…" Perhaps. More remarkable is how the artist's senses are emphasized, that he sees but is deprived of speech and touch. As Smart acknowledges, the cat plays with (dis)order, even though the image is forced into the section on doubling. In this tension-filled portrait, the cat wins because the artist is largely helpless. The complexity quotient of Colville's art goes up.
Curators should avoid taking the term "didactic panel" literally and integrating an artist's readings of his work uncritically. In the section on longing, for example, understanding of the masterly Embarkation (1994) is foreclosed and a full response to a complex image denied. We see a woman in a boat with a man sitting above her on a dock. The boat is tethered. She could be climbing up or down the ladder, yet Smart writes that "anxiety" prevails: "Expressing the very antithesis of control, this painting represents feelings of inevitability and of moving into the uncertainty of the future.…as a child matures, a parent must relinquish authority." No doubt this is how Colville sees the work and why he executed it. But there is little if anything in the image—the title notwithstanding—to suggest that the young woman is leaving rather than returning. In Observer (2002), a woman on a dock looks at the back of the capped head of a person in a sailboat. She has binoculars beside her. Smart insists that she has been watching for this man's return, but she could as well be preparing to see him off. This picture is indeed "another episode in a mysterious melancholy narrative of longing and return," but Smart—unlike Colville—effectively evacuates the mystery by limiting the ambiguities essential to the work's appeal and meaning.
There is an abiding subtlety in Colville's best work. Some of the frames on his recent paintings, for instance, provide remarkable architectural reverberations of the paints they surround. Some are grey, others black, but we cannot fall back on simplistic associations with the content of any given work. His themes cross over one another and result in images more intricate than the catalogue or the installation acknowledge. The show's hanging mimicked this conformity, missing opportunities for dramatic placement of the major works.
Is there nothing new to say about Colville, or are we afraid to say it? Colville's strengths remain. They wait patiently for a more telling context.
Tom Smart, Douglas & McIntyre/Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 144 pp, $55.00.
Winter 2004
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