Carol Wainio
"Carol Wainio" by E.C. Woodley, Winter 2007, pp. 114-15
Carol Wainio’s new paintings bring children’s play to mind: open a picture book, rest it on its edges and magically you have the walls of a house, or a castle, or a fort. The book is a metaphor, a refuge for the imagination as well as a place of shelter for the body. Wainio’s work addresses the immediacy of childhood perceptions of representational images, and the history-bound but seemingly timeless nature of the images themselves.
The social and experiential concerns in play in Wainio’s works, which are populated by a variety of birds, rabbits, wolves and other animals dressed in 19th-century clothing, have their origin in the illustrated books that Wainio takes as her models. In the small canvas The Gap, which features an injured mother rabbit and her child (after an illustration in J.-J. Grandville’s La vie privée et publique des animaux), the name of a chain store in the title also epitomizes an existential condition. Empty shopping bags scattered in the foreground of some of these dreamy works—“masterfully painted (they sometimes look like bonbons),” wrote Gary Michael Dault in the Globe and Mail— evoke the kind of perpetual consumer Christmas described in contemporary advertising. They bring to mind another cartoon by Grandville—a favourite of Marcel Broodthaers, the Belgian artist who also appropriated this early-19th-century French illustrator’s images—in which a panel of courtroom judges passes sentence on a mound of household objects.
These are fascinating paintings to look at. In the large canvas Transformation, Puss in Boots, rendered in deft black outline, attends to a clothesline strung within an open-frame shelter whose shape resembles that of an open book. Around Puss, the weather is cloudy and clear, rainy and rainbow-studded, an atmosphere of perpetual becoming. The clothesline is attached at one end to a small wooden brace, while its other end seems suspended in thin air—or, rather, thick, heady air. It is an unforgettable demonstration of the way children see, and of the in-between state we occupy when we read. Attached here, unattached there, deftly strung in hybrid places.
Wainio’s brush possesses great immediacy. In her work, paint takes on an elemental presence, as it does in van Gogh or Philip Guston. Yet each stroke is also a building block in a structure of meaning— as Wainio once put it, “a search for meaning about things other than painting, using painting.” Like the illustrated books she takes as her theme, her work seeks to “‘educate’ us to images, and through them, to the world.”
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