Blue Republic at Peak Gallery
Just before they departed on Thursday for a 24-hour flight to Thailand
-- where they are modelling and casting their winning entry for a bronze
public sculpture (Peer Gynt) to be installed in Oslo -- Blue Republic,
the international, Polish-Canadian art duo of Anna Passakas and Radoslaw
Kudlinski, somehow managed to complete the exhaustingly complex installation
of their new exhibition, Monochromes.
Monochromes is a rather disarming title for an exhibition that features,
in one half of the gallery, a sprawling, additive work called Beautiful
Infections with Self-Made Man, a sculptural or at least morphological
enterprise that seems infinitely at home with its description as a "work
in progress."
Beautiful Infections (let's call it) is a further development (and the
finest to date) of the work Blue Republic installed at Peak Gallery
in 2005 and again at the Koffler Gallery last March and April -- a proliferating
muster of sheets of cardboard, hunks of ornately shaped Styrofoam, tin
cans, bits of wood and plastic, chunks of concrete (some painted blue),
mixing bowls, shards of metal, electrical tape on the walls, and, resting
majestically on one cardboard tower, the heel of a stale baguette (the
Koffler show featured a half eaten sandwich that Kudlinski had either
put there deliberately or simply forgotten to finish).
Any installation that can incorporate all this dreck and still not look
like garbage is a wondrous thing -- as are all of Blue Republic's undertakings.
Since most of the abject, heterodox elements making up Beautiful Infections
hug the floor (or strive to rise shakily from it), the work can give
the impression, when you stand gazing upon it, of a city far below you,
spreading like a stain in a paroxysm of runaway urbanism. Its disparate
textures, angles and densities suggest, at the same time, some galloping,
unstoppable virus, which has begun in the southern half of the Peak
Gallery and may now spread wherever it likes.
And there is aesthetic and ideological life beyond Beautiful Infections
as well: Blue Republic's brilliant photo -- Untitled (Sierra Leone)
-- of a bunch of bananas chopped cleanly in two (a shockingly economic
way of talking about loss/need/deprivation/castration), for example,
and the mordantly amusing black folding chair with two languid pistols
for arms. It's an unstoppable circus of suggestion and nuance, as angry
and satirically acute as it is handsome and insinuatingly gorgeous.
$500-$6,000. Until Dec. 30, Peak Gallery, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108
about the exhbition
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