Quebec, as the cliché goes, is a brand apart from the rest of the country. It’s always had a healthy appetite and facility with every wave of the avant-garde. European counterparts at mid-century sometimes balked at the non-objective: the Denmark-founded Cobra group could never resist the urge to top up the anthropomorphic with a hallucinatory cartoon face. Quebec, however, jumped on the AbEx bandwagon, and refitted it artfully. The Refus Global used the non-objective as a platform for its own brand of political and catholic iconoclasm. The later hard-edge tradition of Molinari, Gaucher and Barbeau had its own more imagistic stamp.
A rather doctrinaire modernist professor of mine once quipped when he heard that I was moving to Montreal, “There’s nothing happening there.” What he meant was, “They don’t paint like us.” It is something that can be said about Barry Allikas.
<img src="/online/reviews/2009/04/16/allikas2_448.jpg" alt="Barry Allikas Heart Throb 2008″ style=”border: none; clear: none;” /> | |
Allikas’s current show, “New Logic” at Galerie Division, displays a nimbleness of methodology that contrasts with the potentially dreary application of hard-edge tradition. He employs what can be described as postmodern stratagems, but they are more exactly a rigorous cobbling together of oblique methods where the aim is the solicitation of reflection.
Through a process of preliminary computer drawings, compositional adjustments and painstaking paint application, Allikas brings his paintings to a point of visual indecision: they don’t seem drawn, or cropped, or sometimes even like full paintings. But the elements hang together with a certain tension of intent. They evoke a response in the viewer usually reserved for the more operatically painted: a sense of the enigmatic, of potentiality and of that essential element—a faint, lingering scent of the sinister.
<img src="/online/reviews/2009/04/16/allikas3_448.jpg" alt="Barry Allikas New Wave 2009″ style=”border: none; clear: none;” /> | |
This roundabout aesthetic allows Allikas a visual range that escapes most serial art. Heart Throb is a dynamic composition ironically contrasted with the brushless paint and carved shapes of more doctrinaire hard-edge compositions. At first glance, the colour is suitably deadpan: the reds, blues and whites don’t vary in repetition and seem disarmingly commercial. The wobbling, scribbled image, however, pulses out and around a blob-like central shape levelled at the viewer’s heart, like a rave-age Motherwell.
Pierrot Lunaire is an arrhythmic jumble of shapes looking to make sense. They echo and meander like idiots, showing an optical flip-flop that hovers precariously between intense green-yellow and naked canvas: two paintings in one headspace. Allikas’ disjointed titles, while playful, hint at perceptual oddities. A certain psychic tipping point is suggested in Event Horizon, where a teardrop-shaped slab of naked canvas echoes its spatial and compositional ambiguity in sharp, carved echoes of red and yellow.
The artist found his way as a painter by steady reductionism. He has been producing variations and tweaks of hard-edge composition for close to two decades. “New Logic” is more deliberate in its ambiguity. Each piece is a meeting place between intent and act: an event horizon at the precipice of self. (372 rue Ste-Catherine #311, Montreal QC)
<img src="/online/reviews/2009/04/16/allikas4_448.jpg" alt="Barry Allikas Rise 2008″ style=”border: none; clear: none;” /> | |