David Elliott: Magic in a Box
David Elliott Blue Wave 2008 Courtesy Joyce Yahouda Gallery / photo Richard-Max Tremblay
David Elliott’s new paintings are really messed up—but in a good way. He must have had the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense blasting in the background when he conceived of this work. I’ve known of David Elliott’s work since I was an undergrad at Concordia in the early 1980s, when he had just finished his master’s and was teaching some of my friends. That was the time of new image painting and locally people like David, Lynne Hughes and Landon MacKenzie were trying to find their voices and contribute to what felt like a new and vital discourse about the image and the possibilities of paint. Since then I’ve seen David’s work many times as it moved from crudely represented fragments of visual signifiers to a very tight, paste-up, collage appearance. I heard him say once at a talk that a child at one of his shows asked him where he got the big stickers from. That was exactly what came to my mind at the time. It took a child to articulate it clearly. Inevitable comparisons to artists like David Salle always came to mind when I saw the work and I felt that it was somewhere in the shadow of something else, not quite hitting its mark.
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David Elliott “Chutes” 2009 Installation view Courtesy Galerie McClure |
With this new work David Elliott has found his voice, his unique contribution, if you will. The images present the same flat sticker-like fragments but for some reason they are situated inside the distorted three-dimensional space of a box. Things in a box immediately bring to mind Joseph Cornell, the box master. However, because these are paintings, and they do not depict actual objects, they derail any straightforward reading. The subjects are flat reproductions, placed deliberately within the space, never surrendering their flatness, and drawing attention to the deliberate placement, the allusions to meaning. They are images cut from pieces of paper, Photoshopped and forced together, like flat players on a stage. On the one hand you have the issue of painted representation and the mass dissemination of images, and then on the other there is this uncanny presence of the artist’s hand, meticulously assembling the models for the paintings. They read as maquettes, yet for what isn’t evidently clear. They are a glimpse into the stage that is the artist’s world. With this body of work David Elliott has become one of the more interesting painters working today, relentlessly reinforcing the potential and the vitality in paint. (350 ave Victoria/372 rue Ste-Catherine O, Montreal QC)
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David Elliott Nefertiti 2008 Courtesy Joyce Yahouda Gallery / photo Richard-Max Tremblay |
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David Elliott Lindberg 2007 Courtesy Joyce Yahouda Gallery / photo Richard-Max Tremblay |
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