print November 1990

Janet Cardiff

Janet Cardiff’s photography tests the conventions of visual presentation. Using a pinhole camera and extended light exposures, she creates dark foreboding images of the human presence in nature that defy the documentary vantage point of straight photography. In the two groups of work presented here, Cardiff develops short, open-ended narratives. Two-photo wall constructions, which she calls “Hidden Images,” each consist of a small framed photograph beneath a light, positioned behind a larger image mounted on an open steel frame. Cardiff’s couplings of images, such as a dark house emerging through

print October 1990

Brian Groombridge

Minimalism provides the precedent for Brian Groombridge’s most recent sculpture entitled Within One Action There Are Many Gestures, 1990. Here Groombridge has arrived at a synthesis of form that reduces the superfluous to the necessary and immediate. Using a stainless steel I beam which projects 20 feet into the air, the artist has fixed a rod halfway up that holds two carpenter’s set squares welded together to form a rectangle. The work echoes its downtown Toronto setting that is dominated by a construction frenzy and the verticality of skyscrapers.

Groombridge’s piece is a simple configuration

print September 1990

Judith Schwarz

The strength of Judith Schwarz’s work depends upon her dexterous handling of material and a growing vocabulary of forms. Schwarz has an affinity for steel and wood, and the majority of the wall pieces exhibited here incorporate both materials in seemingly effortless union.

The earliest sculpture in the exhibition is a three-part work entitled Parallel Language, 1987, which juxtaposes a circular die-cut steel sheet mounted on the wall, a minimalist steel beam that angles out from it and onto the floor, and a steel stencil of a leaf shape leaning against the wall beside a magnificent slice of oak.

print Summer 1990

Carolyn White

Carolyn White’s near mural-size photopaintings of men and women weeping adopt the conventions of traditional portraiture to examine the distinctions which separate photography and painting. The product of an adapted, computerized spray-printing process, commonly seen in billboard advertising, these ten works are experienced in the gallery as a barrage to the senses; they engulf the viewer in a sea of spent tears, swollen lips, and suspect emotion.

White has created a catchall of art chic. She references the scale, subject, and pointillist technique of Chuck Close, while adopting the earnestness

print February 1990

Yves Gaucher

With the emergence of his new “Pale Series,” 1988–89, Montreal-based painter Yves Gaucher has brought full circle his 25-year-long preoccupation with color. Using pale blues, light violets, and grayish mauves, rusts, and greens, Gaucher paints on a monumental scale––his canvases can reach 20 feet in length. The paintings are sectioned off into four or five vertical surfaces of flat, even color presented in a sequential progression. By now, his use of diagonal abutments has become a formula which serves almost as a hallmark, distinguishing his paintings from those of others working in a minimalist

print December 1989

Andre Fauteux

Andre Fauteux’s dedication to the exploration of abstract form has not wavered since the early ’70s. During this time he has moved away from a reliance on the vocabulary of formalism to an exploration of space and the translation of sculptural form within that space. With the shift in taste that has reconfirmed the importance of abstraction, Fauteux’s sculptures are now being reexamined with keen interest. In these six recent sculptures, Fauteux is predominantly working in brass, a material that exerts its tensile strength while implying a visual rigidity. By leaving the brass roughly hewn, he

print May 1989

Gerard Päs

Gerard Päs’ sculptures and watercolors are a fusion of pure form within a self-sustaining vision of purgatory. Päs uses the utopian vision of the Russian Constructivist and De Stijl movements, adopting their clean precise lines, stark geometry, and the latter’s primary-color combinations. This is not to suggest, though, that the exhibition serves as a sweeping homage; rather, it sets the ideals of purity and order against the artist’s personal backdrop of physical disability. At a very early age, Päs was stricken with the polio virus, which resulted in physical impairment. Since 1977 his disability

print March 1989

Betty Goodwin

Betty Goodwin’s drawings explore the physical parameters of gesture, both real and imaginary. Working with wax, pigment, and ash, Goodwin creates life-size figures that seem to hover on enormous sheets of translucent vellum. Her characters are remote and faceless, caught between human presence and absence. She takes full liberty to remove a limb or extend the significance of a movement through repeated layers of opalescent color. In drawings such as Figure with Megaphone, 1988, the individual forms entwine themselves in a multiplicity of arm and leg movements that offer few clues. By stripping

Linda Genereux