The Art Gallery of Northumberland (Cobourg) “The Landscape Within: Greg Angus and the Duality of Place.”
I had never visited The Art Gallery of Northumberland in Cobourg before, and when I finally did so, a few weeks ago, to see an exhibition of paintings by Toronto-based artist Greg Angus, it was all an invigorating surprise.
There were two surprises, actually, that unfolded, one into the other. The first surprise was that there could be, sequestered away on the third floor of the town’s regal Victoria Hall (1860), such a gleaming white, exquisitely proportioned art gallery such as the Art Gallery of Northumberland turned out to be. It’s been quite a long time since I stood in any space dedicated to the exhibiting of contemporary art that seemed quite so spatially right.
The second surprise was the knock-down, flat-out, full-throttle, hair-raising visual push of Greg Angus’s paintings. All of them are the stuff of delicious paradox: rampant, runaway delicacy; muscular deliberation, hearty miniaturization, miniature grandeur.
A visitor’s initial encounter with the exhibition is likely to be arresting one: Angus’s joyous and commandingly supersaturated painting, We Are What We’ve Been Waiting For (the man has a gift for titles), glimpsed in part through the doorway of the gallery as you walk in, opens out before you like a sunrise.
The thing is huge (96” x 288”). And challenging in the stridency, almost the indecency of its sensuousness.
Guest curated by architect-artist-writer-musician Dimitri Papatheodorou, the Angus exhibition, which the curator has titled “The Landscape Within: Greg Angus and the Duality of Place,” consists of nine paintings, all of which are made with encaustic on wood, encaustic being a highly demanding, rather turgid medium that is essentially a magma of coloured pigment (oil paint in Angus’s case) suspended in hot wax. It’s hard to manage. Painting with encaustic is sort of like colouring with a wax crayon as big as a pickup truck. Because of its technical difficulty, not many artists have employed it: Jasper Johns comes to mind in American art, and the late Tony Scherman used it pretty exclusively here in Canada. Angus is a master of it.
What may look at first glance like the wildness and spontaneity of classic abstract-expressionist painting in Angus’s work soon makes way for something quite unlooked for in work this untrammelled and tumultuous. Angus’s paintings are wild but not unruly. They are chromatically intense (look at the glorious blues and innocent yellows and pockets of incendiary red in We Are What We’ve Been Waiting For), but there is an unusual visual serenity to them. Each of them in enterable, almost contemplative, in a way that abstract expressionist paintings never can be. Angus’s virtuoso paintings embody not rupture but rapture.
This is clearly traceable to the artist’s recourse to encaustic as his medium. The encaustic process is felt, but not witnessed. I don’t know very much about it, but I do know that it involves the pouring, layering, puddling, pooling, cutting, sanding and repouring of the waxy paint that is as arcane as alchemy and as highly deliberate as painting ever gets. The process results in encaustic surfaces that are strangely, almost eerily smooth, silken, almost fleshly. Even Angus’s apparently expressive “accidents” (the glory of wild and raucous abstraction) are here folded and smoothed into his paintings so that his pictures manage to look both joyously hectic and softly, patiently explorable at the same time.
There is a doubleness here both of method and of apperception and much of it is hinted at in the second part of Papatheodorou’s title for the exhibition: “The Landscape Within: Greg Angus and the Duality of Place.”
The “Duality of Place” alluded to here is doubtless an entryway into Angus’s having lived and worked in Japan for a number of years where he became, and now remains, a serious student and teacher of the martial-arts discipline of Aikido, a discipline that, as Paptheodorou puts it in the exhibition’s catalogue essay, teaches a “harmonizing with force rather than opposing it.” Incoming energy, he writes, is redirected “with a gentle pivot.” In Angus’s passionate yet mellifluous art, the act of painting becomes what Papatheodorou terms “a blend of surrender and control. Angus leans, he writes, “into the wax’s inertia.”
This is colourfully put and charmingly theatrical. And no doubt true. All I want to add, however, is that when you visit the exhibition you will surely have to acknowledge that you’ve never seen heroic “leaning” in your entire life, or, for that matter, gentle “pivoting” that, paradoxically, knocks you over with its painterly elan and oceanic verve.
The Greg Angus exhibition continues at the Art Gallery of Northumberland until August 30.
