CaoYang
 The Artist Project, A Contemporary Art Fair
Better Living Center
Exhibition Place

Ninety four artists' booths- hundreds upon hundreds of artworks, mostly middle of the road, if technically proficient, but   the quality overall has improved a lot since this annual bazaar   started seven years ago. There is now a juried selection, UNTAPPED Emerging Artists,  which showcases work by very young, very promising artists. Also the inclusion of an installation Rocco,  by Bruno Billio, at the front entrance added a great deal of panache to the show this year.

One artist who got   my attention is  Cao Yang, a graduate of OCADU. His images of a nude teenage girl, her eyes and the top of her head hidden  by a dense cottony cloud  disturbed me so I decided to investigate.  Cao  Yang explained his work derives from Buddhist philosophy, and that he employs a female model in order to explore his  feminine side. The nude depicted is waif-like and  white.  I was surprised  in talking with  Cao, who is  very open to discussing  his work, that  he seemed  oblivious to  issues around  the representation of women .

Cao Yang

That they are nude makes the thin creatures  even more vulnerable, but hiding  their eyes creates a very strong tension, emphasizes the physicality of her naked body. If I understood Cao, the cloud represents  Mind distracted by desires and emotions. Is he then embracing or repudiating his feminine side?  I'm still trying to decide if  his work bothers me  because  it's  sexist or because it's original. Maybe both. I felt more comfortable with the image of   a woman  with four arms tightly hugging  her body. She struggles within herself, is not as objectified, looks both fragile and strong.

Stopping By Woods
Artport, Harbourfront 


Six  contemporary Canadian artists  address our relationship to nature  in this cohesive exhibition  curated by Patrick Macaulay. The renovated space of the Artport   provides a large welcoming space in which to  view five    large black and white paintings    by Monica Tapp   and opposite , four vibrant canvasses by Gary Evans.
 In Evan's paintings energetic brushwork weaves together to form dense tangles of  colour and form. As always he is a master at playing of f one kind of space against another. Amorphous shapes seem to float in front of the  surface , in other places mysterious tunnels draw the  eye back through clusters of vivid brushwork.  While  I didn't find these works as fascinating as some of his earlier  ones where he  mixes urban imagery with landscape motifs, they have many beautiful passages and push at the boundaries of  both tradition and abstraction.

Gary Evans, oil on canvas

Monica Tapp, ink on canvas

Monica Tapp's large photo-based views of woodland are very intriguing. With feathery brushstrokes she recreates every detail of the foliage. The sensation of greenery lit up by sunlight contrasts with the 

achromatic representation of it. Is this a photo or painting? What is a  truthful representation?  The helpful notes on the artist reveal that Monica Tapp is interested in both  perception and memory. Her work is similar to Evans in that it can't easily be categorized. Her lovely canvasses raise questions about what  we know and how we know it. 

This concern with perception  and also our expectations of landscape imagery   prevail in a video by Gwen MacGregor. In a series of photo stills shot in France MacGregor depicts a  grove of leaf-laden birches but she reverses the sequence of budding and leafing- out so that we first see the copse in full-leaf. As the video progresses and the trees revert to bud stage , two nuclear silos are exposed behind the now bare twigs.  MacGregor delicately presents us with a view of nature we might prefer not to acknowledge. 

A series of monochromatic works on paper by Doreen Wittenbols that reference the very Canadian experience of camping in the wilderness also resonated with me. I liked her reference to Tom Thomson, which was brave rather cliched.

Two installations, one by Robert Hengeveld  and another by Janet MacPherson, rounded out this excellent  show.

Robert Hengeveld

Janet MacPherson

PABLO MUNOZ

No Walls Between Us

This large mural is on the exterior wall of the Art Gallery of Ontario, adjacent to the main entrance on Dundas Street.  It 's  by the Columbian/Canadian artist and activist Pablo Munoz. He came to Canada as a refugee in 2000 and in @014 won the WorldPride Solidarity Youth Art Contest.
Utilizing the heroic scale of Social Realist  art, Munoz creates a powerful affirmation of  human, specifically, queer rights. This public  intervention is  both readily understandable and aesthetically subversise. It is both poignant and  powerful. Kudos to Munoz and the AGO.

NOW’S THE TIME
Jean- Michel Basquiat at the Art Gallery of Ontario

What makes Basquiat   great is the insight with which he addresses  the question Who Am I?  and by extension, Who Are We? As the artist said himself, he had not seen a black man in  art.  A passionate confrontation with racism  and social injustice informs his virtuoso output. In fact the title of the exhibition is taken from a speech by Martin Luther King.

Basquiat’s works are mostly figurative, combined with idiosyncratic signs, graffiti- like markings and  word lists layered with paint or/ and  collage. His portraits stand out for their vitality,  and passionate honesty.  Untitled, 1981,(above) is large.  Brilliantly hued, complex and revealing, the features and forehead are divided by a line that tries to stitch the divided self back together. Untitled/Self Portrait, 1984, is a medium sized line drawing in oil stick of a vibrant, dread locked Basquiat trapped, like a genie in a bottle.

He pays homage to Picasso in an intimately scaled drawing, Young PICASSO, 1984, oil stick on paper. Like Picasso he combines sensitive contour lines, distorted forms, and breathtaking colour in strong compositions that strike at the heart while engaging the mind.  

In Six Crimee, 1983 a very large work on three Masonite panels, in acrylic and oil stick, a line of six male heads float across the upper third of the work on an impasto background of luminous greens as beautifully transcendent as Munch’s deathbed greens, and the context suggests that this is a memorial to six youths who have died young on the street. The artist has scratched through thick paint to create games of hangman and X’s and O’s which also suggest the city, graffiti and hieroglyphs of a personal kind. Two portraits of his friend Michael Stewart, arrested for spray- painting, then beaten to death by the arresting officers hang nearby. 

Three works from the mid-eighties when Basquiat collaborated with Andy Warhol are displayed in the last of four large galleries.  In the most disturbing, Florida, 1984, Warhol stenciled the name of the state in thick black letters along with a dollar sign and the  number  seventy-nine. Jean –Michel added the outline of a glaring sun, the British word for gas- petrol, and a Pinocchio-like character in a top hat. The work is prescient –the hanging chads of 2000. It’s a strong antidote to vacation brochure Florida which blots out the history of slavery and the reality of oppression, poverty and corruption.

Basquiat sometimes felt forced to give to his dealers works he did not consider finished, the demand for them was so fierce. But EXU, 1988 one of Basquiat’s last works, shows the artist as a warrior/ god. Here he recaptures the intense energy of his earlier works in an explosive burst of paint and oil stick. Another painting entitled, Obnoxious Liberals, 1982 provokes  the uncomfortable feeling that I may be one of them, as I glide from piece to piece in this revealing, hard-hitting exhibition by a great artist of the late twentieth century.
The time is always now for art like this.