Burlington Art Centre - Process & Presence

Process & PresencePaintings by Robert Cadotte & Peter Kirkland

September 29 to November 10, 2002

1333 Lakeshore Rd., Burlington Ontario L7S 1A9Telephone: (905) 632-7796 • Fax: (905) 632-0278

Email: [email protected] • Website: www.BurlingtonArtCentre.on.ca

Curator’s Tour: Monday, September 30, 2 pmExhibition Reception: Sunday, October 6, 2 pmArtists’ Tour and Talk: Monday, October 7, 7 pm

Curator: George WaleGuest Writer: Maria Whiteman, McMaster University

Publication Design: Wordsmith Design and Advertising

ISBN 0-919752-88-8

AcknowledgementsThe Burlington Art Centre gratefully acknowledges the financial support of our

Membership, Corporate Members and Sponsors; the BAC Foundation; Arts Burlington; the Volunteer Council; the City of Burlington; the Ontario Arts Council; The Canada

Council for the Arts; and the Federal Department of Canadian Heritage. Special thanks to the Bau-Xi and Michael Gibson Galleries for the loan of Robert Cadotte’s paintings.

Cover Photos (top to bottom)Peter Kirkland – Detail of “Painting for Alex, No. 1”, 2002 Peter Kirkland – Detail of “Painting for Alex, No. 2”, 2002

Robert Cadotte – Detail of “Intersection”, 2000 Robert Cadotte – Detail of “Short Form & Contraction”, 2001

Bibliography1. Berger, John. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London and Harmondsworth:

British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, pp 31-32.2. Hunter, Sam, John Jacobus and Daniel Wheeler. (1998) Modern Art,

Prentice Hall N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, pp 237-239, pp 394-395.

Our Vision: • Inspiring imagination, enriching lives.

Our Mission Statement:The Burlington Art Centre champions therole and value of art in life. We providediverse experiences and discovery as a lead-ing and sustainable organization through:• Nurturing artistic development• Being a home to our art and fine craft

guilds and groups• Exhibition and education programs,

special events and community outreachservices

• Our acclaimed permanent collection ofceramic art

• Volunteer and active community partici-pation opportunities

• Retail services, memberships and corpo-rate partnerships

Our Principles and Values:We believe…

Openness and AccessibilityIn being open to new ideas, opportunitiesand insights, as well as being accessible toall members of our community related totheir interests, needs and capacities.

Entrepreneurial and InnovatingIn creating art and fine craft opportunities andexperiences that encourage individuals to takerisks, explore new territory, to be forwardthinking and to act on their inspirations.

Committed to Art and a Learning CultureIn nurturing and evolving a learning cul-ture of educational, research and practiceexperiences and discovery that advancesthe knowledge of and a commitment to artand fine crafts within residents, the Centreand the community.

The Burlington Art Centre

In Painting for Alex No.4, recognizableforms float and shift in a dark, fluid-filledspace. The image is similar to what onemight expect to see in an ultra sound, orwhat one might imagine as a stage in thedevelopment of the human child. But totake all of these pieces only as depictionsof embryonic development would be tounderstand Kirkland’s pieces too literallyand descriptively, as the “real” meaningbehind symbolic forms that are in factintended to register deeper and moreambivalent expressions. Above all else, theartist’s emotional involvement in the creation of these forms comes throughstrongly. In contrast to the biomorphicimages that are already present inKirkland’s earlier pieces, his new paintingsconcentrate on the tension between thefluidity and movement of their centralforms in contrast with the frame of thepainting, which contains their movementwithin confined boundaries. In every case,Kirkland’s configurations stay within thepainting, rather than enter from one areaof the canvas and/or deviate to another.This in part creates the tight control andfeelings of stasis that the paintings invokeat times. In No. 1, this element of immo-bility can be seen in the juxtaposition of ayellow organic shape against a reddishcolour, which gives all the weight in thepainting to the form. This molecular struc-ture is painted with great intensity byKirkland, who believes that it produces aresonance emblematic of the unknown.The large yellow form in this piece isdeliberate and demanding apart from itsabstract and flat shape; it remains lumi-nous and radiant, symbolizing the tran-scendence of organic growth. On theother hand, the illusions of light and darkin Phrygian Cap creates a ghostly andadditive effect on the transparent shapesthat is drastically different from the solidand flat forms in No.1.

In Kirkland’s earlier work, the trans-parent non-representational forms areeloquently painted with veils of lightadding and subtracting intensity to differ-ent parts of the canvas. His ethereal shapessometimes drip with paint and are strong-ly expressive: even though they are frozenin time, on the verge of shifting and mov-ing, but unable by virtue of being fixed inpaint. This is captured in Kirkland’s draw-

ings as well, but in a different fashion.There are specific areas in his drawingsthat convey the division between some-thing real and imagined. In Assumption,body parts are transfigured into unusualforms that are then suspended on thepaper. There are shapes that resemble fin-gers rising up from the bottom of thedrawing, stretching out to the nebulousshapes hovering above them, creating atension that is unresolved. The marks onKirkland’s drawings are looser and bolderthan his paintings, which bring about aneffective synthesis of natural and imposedelements.

ProcessAs Henry Moore once wrote, “because a

work does not aim at reproducing naturalappearances it is not, therefore, an escapefrom life – but may be a penetration intoreality…an expression of the significanceto greater effort in living” (Hunter: 1998).Kirkland’s work embodies this statement,looking deeply into life without feeling theneed to reproduce it in a “life-like” man-ner. They come instead at the mysteries oflife in another, deeper way.

His figures look like the marine lifeimagined to live in the darkest depths ofthe ocean, or like images of the micro-scopic ephemeral organic material thatour bodies are constantly creating,destroying, encountering and shedding.They symbolize a never-ending process:the continuity of life, the endless divisionsof cells into new organisms. Kirkland hasdevised a perfect form in which to capturethese processes. In his work, one shapemorphs into another, receding and disap-pearing against a backdrop indifferent toits struggles. As viewers, our focus ispulled back and forth from figure toground in a way that emphasizes thatexperience is always about both ephemer-ality and continuity, categories whichthemselves are unstable and indistinct:ground can equally stand as the figure.Though these central concerns will nodoubt persist, we can expect thatKirkland’s work will transform with thechanges that he is about to undergo in his life.

Maria Whiteman

These artists are possessed by their painting processes … theyare simultaneously immersed within, and transported beyond, themental and physical actions of applying and removing paint.When in the presence of their paintings we, the viewers, are drawninto their realities – we make them whole through our perceptionand subsequent search for meaning.








ISBN 0-919752-88-8



























Maria Whiteman


Robert CadotteRobert Cadotte’s paintings explore multi-

ple modes of expressing temporalityand space in and through the landscape.

Throughout his career, Cadotte hasapproached the art of landscape painting byconstantly shifting themes and forms, moving between abstract and representa-tional modes, and often juxtaposing thetwo in single pieces and across whole bod-ies of work. What emerges from his variedartistic explorations is a sense of intimacyand familiarity, especially for those con-nected to the landscape of Ontario.Invoking the concept of familiarity in thiscontext immediately suggests stereotypicalimages of landscape painting: mimeticallyperfect representations of running streams,glistening snow-capped peaks, rustling grassand sun-dappled forests. The intimacy ofCadotte’s paintings goes well beyond theessentially romantic relationship towardsthe landscape that has persisted unchangedinto our technological age. His work probesat the deeper psychological and bodily rela-tionship we experience in our encounterwith specific landscapes, especially thosethat marked us in our youth. By pulling outmarks and fragments of these landscapesand by bringing them to the fore, Cadotteexplores whole spaces through a depictionof its component parts. As Marcel Proustshowed us so memorably in In Search ofLost Time, this is how memory works: anunexpected taste, the smell of somethinglong forgotten yet intimately familiar, animage caught out of the corner of our eye aswe hurry through our day – the experienceof such fragmentary moments can producemuch more powerful sensations than theblunt realities that stare us in the face every-day. Cadotte’s paintings invoke the specificsof his places and spaces in just this way: hismarks, fragments, and even the texture andstrokes in his work bring painting and placetogether without the need to sketch outevery leaf on the tree.

ProcessCadotte has recently moved to Montreal

after living in South Western Ontario for thelast twenty-five years. In Simcoe, Cadotteexperienced the changing seasons and thelong-drawn-out winters typical of Northernlandscapes. His studio sat in a quiet neigh-borhood adjacent to other small warehousesthat have a semi-abandoned look to them;once prosperous, this part of Ontario hasentered a slow decline. Cadotte had a mod-est studio made up of several rooms. At anyone time, each room had a single paintinghanging in it, a painting Cadotte continuesto struggle with, an emotional relationshipthat he is still working to properly express.

Cadotte’s canvases are deeply scarredwith heavy marks. Over the course of theday, Cadotte rotates between his paintings,shifting from one piece to another, alwaysworking on a single painting and a specificexpression, but developing commonthemes amongst successive works at thevery same time. The worn surfaces and tex-tures of wood that can often be found inCadotte’s work are remarkably similar tothe furniture that graces his home. This isn’tmere coincidence. Prior to devoting himselfto painting, Cadotte was an accomplishedfurniture-maker, and he brings to the canvas the aesthetics and materiality of

someone familiar with the labour of workingwith and against the grain. He applies paintto his canvases through a labourious processof carving, scraping, layering and drying, aprocess that makes a physical and symbolicreference to the natural world through theforce of his marks alone. Though the processis always the same, each piece contains com-plexities of its own: as the shape of the mate-rials begins to take over, they give their ownimpetus to the shape and direction that thefinal piece takes.

The materiality of these works is mostreminiscent of the art of Patterson Ewen andAnselm Kiefer, both of whom layer andinfuse their canvases with matter to the pointwhere they can almost sustain no moreweight. Kiefer’s work has several layers oforganized structures that are prepared withinthe material, conveying the sense of scarredland and the recultivation in his dynamiclandscapes. The canvas is deeply encrustedwith excessive materiality, which creates a spatial illusion of depth. Kiefer once said,“I like to draw the viewer in like a bee to aflower, and for the viewer to get past that, sothat they can get down through the sedi-ment, and get to the essence” (Hunter 1998).Like Cadotte’s beautifully worked surface, heachieves a paradox similar to the doublevision in Kiefer’s paintings – where the land-scape appears serene but metaphorically isscarred. However, while Ewen’s pieces createan almost topographical image of a land-scape, Cadotte’s landscapes remain more elu-sive and open-ended, amidst the heavinessthat has gone into creating them.

PaintingsThe changes that have occurred in

Cadotte’s work over the last several years areevidenced in the various forms and methodspresent in his landscapes. In PhotoOpportunity (1996) and Beach (1996), thepainted surface and compositional form aremore abstract than his recent paintings. The process of integrating extremely wornsurfaces with those that have beenuntouched, and fusing these with squares offlat, solid colours, demonstrate Cadotte’sinterest in balancing geometric and organicforms. These pieces successfully integrate theintellectual and the intuitive through theirordered arrangement of basic shapes in the

frontal plane, producing a distinctive visualvocabulary for these abstract landscapes.

Cadotte’s next splendid series of paintings(1998) extends this vocabulary in two differ-ent directions. Parts of these pieces evoke theclassical serenity of Japanese Ukiyo-e wood-block prints, especially the famous work ofHokusai. Like Hokusai, Cadotte uses thewood grain itself as part of the rhythmic pat-tern and texture of his pieces, working withthe grain to scratch out what in a woodblockwould be waving grass or a delicate sketch oftree leaves. However, in Cadotte’s piecesthese sharp, gestural lines are set against vis-ible geometric grids, as in Particular byChoice (1998) and Illusory Properties (1998).In these pieces, the lines dynamically tearinto the grid that lies underneath them, forging a connection between the fixed andthe impermanent, the technological and thenatural. All of the pieces in this series explorethe polarities of order and chaos that reflectthe relationship not only between thehuman and non-human worlds, but whichexist within nature itself, balanced as it isbetween cyclical regularity and permanententropy and decay. Once again, Cadotteechoes these dualisms through the opposi-tion of flatness and texture, which producesmuch of the power contained in his work asa whole.

Though Cadotte’s most recent paintingscontinue to mine these oppositions, they areless restrained by them formally, and appearcharged with energy. The landscape is nowboth simultaneously visible and indistin-guishable, as if the artist is deliberately play-ing with our desire for clarity. Identifiablefragments of the outside world emerge onthe horizon, but remain veiled and blurry,shimmering behind a representational fog. If in the earlier works, Cadotte’s use of frag-ments evoked both physical and psychologicalexperiences of familiarity, here ghostlyshapes are meant to bring emotions intofocus. Though these paintings display moreverve and vivacity than the earlier grid forms,they do so with an uncharacteristic emotion-al heaviness. Their atmospheric depths pro-duce a solemnity and create the impressionof a landscape that is being injuredand broken through a transformationby some unknown power.

Intersection (2000) and Transcription(2001) both possess a resilience andmass that capture something particu-lar and yet universal. Cadotte’s com-positions compel us to look closely inan effort to find something familiar inwhat are generic images of the land-scape. The form of these recent piecesreinforces this process at another level:the diptychs are arranged so that oneside appears as an abstraction of thepainting beside it, a relationship ofproximity and distance that togetherproduce an interesting dialogue. InCircles and Loops (2000), for example,Cadotte places a painting of trees nextto a fragment of a landscape, whichproduces a disjuncture from thefamiliar, and mimics the multiplicitythat one experiences in a landscape:the shadows that appear and disap-

pear, the wind that ebbs and flows, theopen spaces where one discerns and assim-ilates detail about one’s surroundings. In asimilar way, the landscapes we encounterin Short Form and Contraction (2000) orCurved Downstrokes (2001) are both in fluxand immobile, together forming a newobject with its own contours and lines, thatis calm, peaceful, elusive and yet precise.

Fundamentally, what Cadotte’s paint-ings evoke is the quintessential “stillness”that John Berger describes in Ways ofSeeing. “Original paintings are silent andstill in a sense that information never is,”Berger writes. “In the original painting thesilence and stillness permeates the actualmaterial, the paint, in which one followsthe traces of the painter’s immediate ges-tures” (Berger: 1972). Paintings remainone of the few visual forms that permit thecontemplation of time and space with noother factor affecting the image. This iswhat one experiences in the presence ofCadotte’s diptychs. In PunctuatingAppositives (2001), we see a landscape thatgestures symbolically towards our unful-filled longings for a profound connectionwith nature. Cadotte’s pieces are moving,unfinished narratives that can stop andstart up again anywhere and at anytime;they physically embody that longingfamously expressed by Paul Cézanne: “A minute in the world’s life passes! Tobecome that minute!” (Berger: 1972)

Peter KirklandPeter Kirkland’s work investigates the

style and forms of Symbolism, whichare impressively redefined in his com-

plex visual representations of the quasi-fig-ures depicted in most of his pieces. Thecomplexity and power of his work derive inpart from his ability to produce imagesthat evoke the apparently contradictorycategories that emerge out of his dynamicforms and abstract harmonies. Kirkland’s

paintings are simultaneously opaque andethereal, representational and abstract,mechanical and organic, active and inac-tive. Looking at his work, one cannot helpbut see traces of the work of GeorgiaO’Keeffe and Henry Moore. His luminousdisjointed floating forms introduceMoore’s twisting sculptures into theorganicity produced by O’Keeffe’s choice ofcolour and light, creating unexpected jux-tapositions. However, Kirkland’s mobileforms are laid over a more static back-ground than O’Keeffe’s, producing complexspatial configurations that are both sensu-ous and disturbing. The light shifts over thesurface of the pieces, creating an illusion ofspace similar to the way in which O’Keeffepaints each petal in detail, forcing theviewer to look deep into the flower. Butwhile O’Keeffe’s use of seamless gradientsof colour was meant to be descriptive ofnature, Kirkland’s colours dematerialize hisobjects instead of insisting on theirinescapable solidity. The materializationand dematerialization of forms is a key ele-ment of symbolist aesthetics, which gener-ate their power out of the transformationof personal experiences and emotions intopictorial forms and expressions. This is thetask of Kirkland’s work as well; it is a taskat which he succeeds marvelously.

New PaintingsThe large scale of Kirkland’s most recent

paintings compliments the rounded andcomplex images he continues to developand explore. The forms appear more vitaland whole in these larger spaces. The deephues and velvety textures create a sustain-ing and mesmerizing compositional pat-tern that invites exploration and reflection.

Kirkland’s new paintings are symbolicevocations of his impending parenthood.

Peter Kirkland – Assumption, 2000,30" x 44"

Peter Kirkland – Painting for Alex, No. 1, 2002,72" x 72"Robert Cadotte – Short Form and Contraction, 2001, 24" x 48"

Robert Cadotte – Intersection, 2000, 24" x 48"




























































ISBN 0-919752-88-8



























Maria Whiteman


Documents

Burlington Art Centre - Process & Presence