Ravishing, incomplete, yet apt Scherman pieces

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This article was published 16/01/2010 (5753 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery showcases Tony Scherman’s recent donation of 11 paintings, offering a super-compressed view of the Canadian artist’s 35-year career. This roomful of large-scale encaustic pieces is both ravishing and incomplete, which seems apt, somehow. Scherman’s work has always revolved around beauty and beauty’s inevitable accompaniments — longing and loss.

These themes are set early on. Several works from the 1970s and ’80s reference the still life, a historical genre that the Toronto-based Scherman examines and extends. In the 17th century, the still life usually offered up a bounty of earthly pleasures, along with a stern Christian warning that these pleasures were passing. Fruit is ripe before its rot, flowers riot before they wilt. It makes sense that Scherman would be drawn to this dynamic. Much of his work explores beauty’s poignant edge, sharpened by the knowledge of decay and death.

Scherman’s astonishing portraiture also searches for this fragile beauty. In a monumental but strangely intimate painting of his wife, the artist Margaret Priest, flesh is mutable and marked by time. The painting zooms in on her face from forehead to chin, and in this extreme close-up the colour we vaguely call “flesh tone” opens up into a scrumbled surface of coral and yellow, buff and brown. There are echoes of Rembrandt in the loose paint handling and in the plainspoken but tender tone.

Scherman’s fascination with skin dovetails with his chosen medium of encaustic, in which hot melted wax is coloured with pigments and applied to canvas. Once considered an archaic technique — it dates back to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians — encaustic was taken up again by modern artists like Jasper Johns. Soft and pliable, with a luminous surface that seem to hold bruises and blemishes, encaustic feelingly evokes the vulnerability of flesh.

Encaustic also stands on its own as a palpable record of the artist’s material and process. In Scherman’s works it is dripped, layered, gouged, scraped, scorched and abraded for an almost three-dimensional effect.

Scherman uses all of these techniques when he paints the faces of celebrities. Believing that their likenesses have been deadened by the flat repetitions of mass media and pop culture, Scherman tries to call them back to life. Jim Morrison is shown in a Dionysian pose, head thrown back and lips parted, that could easily slip into black-light poster cliché. Instead, the dead icon is given particularity and presence by the incredible physicality of Scherman’s paint.

Scherman generally paints in series, in which individual images build slowly toward larger narratives. About 1789 investigates the French Revolution and the dangerous, double-edged nature of power. This show includes a dark, glistering piece that superimposes the servants’ entrance to Versailles over a haunting face, while another work depicts the cockerel, the symbol of the French republic. These works are gorgeous but isolated, and can only hint at Scherman’s conceptual concerns.

But then, the show isn’t meant to function as a full-on exhibition. It’s a way to introduce Scherman’s work to viewers, and, as such, this tantalizingly incomplete collection exerts an extraordinary, seductive pull.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Tony Scherman: A Major Acquisition

Winnipeg Art Gallery

Until March 14