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Urban life Art world boy-wonder David Urban's use of the abstract by KEITH MARCHAND
First stop is the René Blouin gallery, where Toronto-based painter David Urban's Form and Colour Society is on exhibit. Urban is especially interested in one particular element of the artistic process: the line. Whether it be scratches and scores, exuberant splashes or controlled, carefully placed forms, Urban takes abstract painting to some fresh new places: full of decay and rot and, at the same time, beguiling and vital.
Down two floors in Galerie B-312, Emmanuel Galland and Samuel Lambert are featured in a photography exhibition entitled Made in China. Galland's series, Twins, features various representations of a pair of identical, crude plastic figurines that were evidently punched out of the same mould. Each image has been reproduced in enormous scale, enabling us to examine the strange and slightly unnerving characters very carefully. We begin to notice that the two are, in fact, not identical, although obviously intended to be. What at first appeared as clones turn out to have individual features. These witty pieces force us to ask questions regarding perfection, identity and individuality. Samuel Lambert's work differs from Galland's in the way that it forms a linear progression. The photos are taken from a video and feature images of an elderly Asian man that dissolve (as one moves along the frames) and are replaced by those of a young Asian woman. Shot in Chinatown at night, the saturated and somewhat lurid colours help blend the characters together so that they never appear entirely substantial. We witness an encounter, yet the two characters never actually meet. This exhibition explores the dichotomy that is inherent in all photography: the constant tension between permanence and instability. David Urban: Form and Colour Society is at René Blouin gallery until July 26. Made in China is at Galerie B-312 until June 28 |
Every now and again, I like to pack my seven children, my hound dog and a case of explosives into my trusty pickup truck and head into the big city for a bit of hoity-toity gallery hopping. One particular episode took me to 372 Ste-Catherine West, a building with more galleries than there are car parts on my front lawn.
In his larger canvases, Urban is careful not to overcrowd, thus allowing the viewer room to move along the various thoroughfares that he has created. The twisting and meandering cables that he applies to subtle fields of colour sometimes flash and streak, and at other times hang flaccid, plump and corpuscle-red like exposed intestines or veins.