The Toronto International Art show held last weekend enabled me to experience “the new abstract movement” after listening to Canadian Art magazine editor Richard Rhodes discuss Montreal artist Chris Kline’s work. Here is a section of a commentary on this new abstract painter Chris Klein from Galerie Rene Blouin: (it has been translated from French, so it might read a little strange)
Born in Oshawa (Ontario) in 1973, works and lives in Montreal.
Favouring a formal vocabulary of disarming simplicity and a radical economy of means, Chris Kline paints on translucent untreated fabrics through which the viewer can decipher the wooden structure on which the surfaces are stretched. Favoring a formal vocabulary of disarming a radical simplicity and economy of means, Chris Kline translucent paints on untreated fabrics through which the viewer can decipher the wooden structure on which the surfaces are stretched. Like the repetitive circular brush strokes of his delicate watercolours, or, like the intensity of the graphite application in his elegant drawings, the almost not-visible marks that animate Chris Kline’s paintings unveil themselves at an excessively slow pace, during a careful inspection of the minute details of each form, each surface. Like the repetitive circular brush strokes of his delicate watercolors, or, like the intensity of the graphite application in his elegant drawings, the almost not-visible marks that animate Chris Kline’s paintings unveil themselves at an excessively slow pace, during a careful inspection of the minute details of each form, each surface. This attentive inspection will provide the clues to reconstitute the crystallization process of the motifs and project them beyond representation. This careful inspection will provide the clues to reconstitute the crystallization process of the grounds and project them beyond representation.
I attempted to relate this information to the talk that I heard and found that the speaker, Richard Rhodes, was able to simplify the above “art talk” by saying that the new abstract was really a movement to the basics. Klein’s work is a sample of this basic simplicity because he enables the substratum of the wooden frame used for stretching canvas, become visible. He doesn’t use canvas; instead, he paints on a translucent linen.
His idea for the series of paintings which Mr. Rhodes discussed was simply watching how his white wall paint changed as the day went by. Each painting was simply a rectangular horizontal large paint chip painted on the lower third of the linen – 6 colour tints. Interesting…
My own work could be classified as new abstract landscape. I break down the detail of the scene into basic shapes and colour. It was reassuring to me to realize that my work was part of a present movement which possibly reflects the need to simplify.
On a train ride, recently, I took pictures as we zoomed past the Canadian landscape. Interestingly, when I uploaded the pictures, the result was indeed an example of the basic shapes of the landscape (see below). At the same international art show, I also found an artist named Dominique Goupil who seemed to be painting this observation of basic movement passing her. She is represented by Galerie Simon Blais in Montreal.
Here is my pic of the moving landscape as observed from a train.
