drape | march 03 - march 29, 2004

Carvings draped in unconventionality
Globe and Mail | Gallery Going | March 27, 2004
by Gary Michael Dault

Carvings draped in unconventionality
by Gary Machael Dault

You might imagine, on a passing acquaintance with them, that the three, roundel-like limestone works making up the Toronto sculptor Carl Taçon’s exhibition Drape, at Toronto’s Peak Gallery, constituted an essay in highly conventional sculptural procedure. Artists cast sculptures these days. Or assemble them. Nobody carves anymore.

But beyond the carving, which, there is in Taçon’s case, is a virtuoso skill, there is little that is merely conventional in these three remarkable pieces. Each of the three carvings here is a tondo (circular format) of flowing, luxuriant drapery, reminiscent, in its opulence, of the liquidity of classical Greek and Roman

But each of these substantial discs of Tyçon’s is a found disc- roundels salvaged from the dismantled façades of dignified Toronto buildings of yore. Tyçon carves on the unseen, inside surface of the decorative architectural stone, on a layer that, as his gallery statement points out, had been sandwiched between the exterior and inner structure of the building, an “ambiguous space that was neither façade nor structure”.

Furthermore, these massive roundels- the surfaces of which were flat and uninflected before Tyçon got hold of them- bear shards of drapery that began as photographs of drapery arranged on the studio floor. The photographed images were then subsequently transferred, by carving, to the waiting surfaces of the round stones. Which means that the original draperies were subjected, in a pile, to gravity’s pressure, whereas the carvings- which, with one exception (a horizontal work called Spread)- stand upright, and therefore do not respond to the gravity that now tugs at them. Which, as Tyçon so cunningly notes, means that the carved stone draperies “maintain the characteristic of a projected image.” Just as painted drapery does.

Given the fact that each of the two vertical carved discs (Medallion and Medallion 2) are just about wide enough and high enough (about four feet in diameter) to index and echo the human body in its own verticality, the effect of an encounter with these elegant works is inescapably visceral. Which insures their sculptural urgency and entirely prevents their slippage into the realm of the merely decorative.

$22,000- $24,000. closes March 29, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108.