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A mastery dark and sinister
by Gary Michael Dault
The new solo exhibition at Toronto’s Peak Gallery is called
Inventory: Paintings and Drawings for Blue Republic, and is the
work of Toronto-based artist Radoslaw Kudlinski. Blue Republic,
to which the show’s title alludes, is a two-person collective,
an art duo, presided over by Kudlinski and his partner, artist
Anna Passakas.
Effortlessly bridging the distances, both aesthetic, political
and historical, between Toronto and their native realm of Poland
(Kudlinski maintains a studio in Krakow), Blue Republic tends
to concern itself with large issues: the ambiguities of personal
freedom, the endless spectre of the totalitarian possibility,
the tenor of the international city as a laboratory for the opposing
programs of utopian/dystopian worlds, the fate of the human in
an increasingly mechanized and computerized culture.
To that end, Blue Republic has had recourse, in its exhibitions,
to the making of large-scale photographs, models and intricate
constructions and assemblages, many of which appear industrially
designed, fabricated and arranged.
The dual-sensibility of the collective is still everywhere present
in this new exhibition by the male half of Blue Republic, but
what is perhaps surprising is the degree to which Kudlinski has
now permitted himself a rough, immediate, personal and painterly
approach to the making |
of the works. Given BR’s reputation
for cerebrality, it’s sort of a shock—albeit a pleasant
one—to encounter these remarkably raw, exquisitely drawn
and brushed essays in personal expressiveness. The pictures may
be “for” Blue Republic, but they’re most definitely
“by” Kudlinski himself.
Stolen Moon, a large delicately patterned blue canvas bearing
a hole where the moon once was, is pretty orthodox Blue Republicanism,
and Union Workers Admiring the Sunrise expertly maintains the
duo’s eerie yoking together of politics and romantic loveliness,
but in a rather severe black, white and red painting like the
inventive and formally compelling Flatliners, Kudlinski generates
a pure, hectically joyous picture-making that transcends, in the
end, the work’s nod towards the bureaucratized condition
of man (there is space in the painting for your name, address
and credit card number) and an address to the idealized city in
the upper air that betrays no notion of the stygian, satanic mechanisms
beneath it that make it hum.
In painting after painting—like the beautiful cardboard
Package Ghost works (Blue Republic loves cardboard), and the majestic,
panoramic cardboard painting New Perspectives on a Deserted City,
Kudlinski comes up with some of the freshest picture-making around,
bringing together an almost indecently sensuous wielding of the
brush and a witty, detailed, cartoonish drawing style that shouldn’t
really work together but do.
Two other paintings deserve to be singled out because of their
sheer mastery: the darkly mysterious, sinister Sweatshop (Balloon
Factory), and the gloriously complex and endlessly explorable
Lolipops Flying to Africa, with its hedonistic pinks and greens
and yellows, traversed by dark, horizontal, weapon-like configurations.
And take a look at the confetti-coloured skull that floats in
the upper right of the canvas. It alone is a test of excellence
in painting: I don’t think there’s anything better
anywhere in the new art than this grinning, confectionary spectre.
$800--$12,000. Until September 10. 23 Morrow Ave. 416-537-8108. |
