The Abstract Form

Italo-Canadians display works at Joseph D. Carrier Gallery

Abstract art never really left Toronto," explained Flavio Belli, well-seasoned curator of the Joseph D. Carrier Gallery. "It just took an even deeper turn towards the conceptual."
Describing the Toronto art scene is a Gordian knot for any critic, but it's my belief that any art arena is in good health so long as abstraction is given its due nod of approval. Belli frames this exhibition of the second in a series, the first being the Go Figure exhibition which featured works on, explicitly, the body. This show, he notes, "is historically based and there are a lot of references to other periods of painting, especially Miro and Matisse's cutouts."
This month's show, Abstractions showcases emerging and mid-career artists of Italian descent waxing conceptual onto the canvas, specifically: Nick Biagini, Silvana Bruni, Julie Garibotti, Tom Grella, Mascia Manunza, Robert Marra, Anthony Mazzone, Richard Mongiat, Lisa Petrocco, and Diego Spinelli.
Mongiat, an artist in the show whose paintings are small-format, borderline cartoonish, makes loose references to machinery, and comments that the artists in this show "have chosen to work within a genre once considered heroic and now are viewed by some as suspicious."
Diego Spinelli describes his heavily textured (hole-ridden) surfaces as emerging from "a series of thoughts, emotions, and different states of mind." While this could be an artist statement for any art show known to have ever existed, its generality speaks of something mystically latent in the abstract intention.
Abstract painters usually speak less of content or reference, and more (naturally) of colour and feel. Lisa Petrocco's original microscopic investigations which project the small into large-scale canvases works with a kind of stucco. The viewer is found staring into translucent globular swirls and jabs woven above and between colour, texture its second language. Her sense of colour, Belli explains, "definitely has a retro feel, stylistically she plays with colours from the 50s and 60s."
Standing back from her pieces, you can see a nostalgic underpinning of grandmotherly wallpapers, house-lady dresses, and in contrast, the threat of a (specifically Torontonian?) disease (whose name shall remain unannounced for fear of its imminent arrival!).
Unlike Petrocco, whose work relishes pattern layered upon pattern, is Silvana Bruni's nostalgic narrative world located certainly in childhood, but very much linked to her present self as a drummer in the band The Great Forgetting. Bruni recycles her old drumskins as surfaces to paint on and takes her cues from the marks made there during shows and practices of impassioned beating. With titles such as "The Monsters Under My Loves" and "Violet Birds Like Fireworks," Bruni is clear of her references, and uses the titles as a key opportunity to guide the viewer into her world.
Nick Biagini also makes use of the titles, such as "My Family: Cradling, Shaping, Loving." In this mostly grey painting, planetary orbs of colour interconnect according to an esoteric logic. It may not have been an unintentional choice to use primary colours for the primary figures in his life. But Biagini's work challenges the viewer to see family in blobs. For some of us, this conceptual trick is not so hard. Biagini spoke of his "love of yellow ochre." As a teacher, art is something he may do" on the side" but Biagini's canvases have a playfulness that he notes "can only come if you don't go to art school."
This show will lead anyone to an easel to experiment with the most fundamental consistency present in these artists, the love for colour, choreographed colour, caught to dry on its way to another place.

Abstractions shows at the Joseph D. Carrier Art Gallery, 901 Lawrence Ave. West, until February 29. For more information call 416.789.7011.

Publication Date: 2004-02-15
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3631