Harold Feist
"Harold Feist" by John Armstrong, Winter 2006, p. 86
Has anyone come along who might supplant Joan Miró as the exemplar of humour in abstract painting? Nineteen-eighties Neo-Geo offered some lighter moments, but this was often in the realm of parody, which has an ironic, hollow ring to it. In recent Canadian art, the work of the Vancouver painter Elizabeth McIntosh embodies the kind of intrinsic humour I am thinking of: McIntosh’s loopy brushwork, candied palette and laconic patterning is comically delightful. Before his present exhibition, one might not have connected humour to the work of the veteran Toronto artist Harold Feist.
Humour is in large part context and staging, and Feist’s work has long been associated with the kind of post-painterly abstraction that celebrates painting’s formal qualities. In the 1980s, the genre evolved to embrace various matting agents and gels in order to mitigate the nasty plastic sheen of thick acrylic and add texture, countering acrylic paint’s tendency to flatten. Over this period, no one mastered acrylic cuisine better than Feist.
The paintings in the present exhibition reiterate an all-over compositional formula familiar to abstraction. Feist spreads layered miasmas of opaqued and mysteriously frosted colour onto his canvases. In each painting, a different colour predominates: sometimes subtle chromatic buffs and greys, at other times the full-tilt, abrasive colours that only acrylic paint is capable of producing—toxic quinacridone violets, dioxazine purples and naphthol pinks. Into this soup Feist salt-and-peppers various bits of floating detritus soaked in high-key colour. He acquired all of these bits at a dollar store, and they are mightily evident. We find pigment-doused hair barrettes, glass marbles, sliced sponges (resembling sponge toffee), string, wooden beads (the oblong ones one finds in doorway curtains) and, most comically, cotton balls— some of which come off on your clothing if you pass too near the artwork.
This is just not the sort of thing one associates with high formalist painting. What comes to mind? Miró’s paintings from between 1925 and 1927— exemplified by The Birth of the World. Like Feist, Miró started with a splooshy generative ground. He would then add coloured biomorphic shapes that often had funny little pointy bits suggestive of bodily protuberances. Feist’s cheery pigmented additions are almost engulfed by the ground around them, and again suggest a kind of bodily presence, or perhaps absence—a missing person: all that is left is the impression of makeup puffs, hair barrettes and half-eaten toffee.
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