“10th Annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition” runs to Nov 23. Thu-Sun noon-6pm. $3-$5. The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, 231 Queens Quay. 416-973-4949.
www.thepowerplant.org. “Carte Blanche, Volume 2: Painting” runs to Dec 28. Tue-Sun 11am-6pm. Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen W. 416-395-0067.
www.mocca.ca.
To begin with the dismal: Jeremy Hof has won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, an award that once was a useful, even inspiring, barometre for the state of painting and its emerging to mid-career practitioners in this country. Hof follows 2007 winner Arabella Cambell in indicating the award jury’s increasing privileging of dispassionate abstractionism — a phrase that describes almost all of this year’s finalists, currently on display at the Power Plant. Hof’s Layer Painting Red — a white painting whose alternating red layers are revealed in the grooves of carefully beveled perpendicular lines — is more minimalist sculpture than painting. As if it were 1970, a panel tells us the work “[confounds] our understanding of what a traditional painting is.” Needless to say it doesn’t — in 2008, this kind of post-painterly approach is, in fact, dully traditional, recycling a decades-old avant-garde gesture which has lost most of the philosophical or aesthetic rebelliousness it might once have (fleetingly) had.
A bit of a palette cleanser (so to speak) can be found at MOCCA’s “Carte Blanche Volume 2: Painting.” Here are highlights from The Magenta Foundation’s just-released volume of hundreds of Canadian painters, from emerging to established, and curators Clint Roenisch and David Liss have cut a wide swath (although, for whatever reason, have omitted a few great local craftspeople included in the book, like Derek Mainella and Gillian Iles, whose terrific new show just wrapped at Propeller). Looking at the figurative work in the exhibit — notably by Derek Root, Mike Bayne and Dorian Fitzgerald, and even by quasi-abstractionists like Alexandra Flood and Melanie Rocan — it is clear that, as a medium, painting finds considerable power in tradition. And it is this tradition, especially now that it has lain dormant for a period, that actually makes a good painting feel perpetually new — like a sunny day, perhaps, whose pleasures may be anticipatable, but are no less delicious for being so.