Mexican curator Karen Huber in front of art work by Chilean artist Rolankay (1989-) titled Illumination, 2025, oil on canvas 67-3/4 x 59-7/8 inches courtesy of Isabel Croxatto Galeria from Santiago, Chile
Art Toronto is Canada’s leading art fair, held annually at the Metro Convention Centre located on Front Street in the vibrant downtown area of Toronto. It is the largest art fair in the country, showcasing works from both emerging young artists and established masters. Under the leadership of Mia Nielsen, the Director of Art Toronto, the fair has consistently thrived, with a new central theme introduced each year. This year, the focus is on Latin American art (Arte Sur), curated by Karen Huber, a Mexican curator and gallerist based in Mexico City. Huber is recognized for her innovative approach to presenting contemporary Latin American art from Central and South America. She has assembled 11 esteemed galleries for Art Toronto, which are featured in a dedicated section of the fair’s exhibition space. The participating galleries include Alejandra Topete Gallery from Mexico City, Mexico; Aninat Galería from Vitacura, Chile; BLOC Art from Lima, Peru; Crisis Gallery from Lima, Peru; deCERCA from San José, Costa Rica; Judas Galería from Valparaíso, Chile; Isabel Croxatto Galería from Santiago, Chile; PROXYCO Gallery from New York, USA (featuring Latin artists); Subsuelo from Rosario, Argentina; Swivel Gallery from New York, USA (featuring Latin artists); and The White Lodge from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The Latin American focus is a must see. According to Huber, every art fair in the world needs a section for Latin American art. This huge continent brims with creativity encompassing all mediums resulting in fresh works touching upon all aspects of humanity stemming from young voices, indigenous peoples, well seasoned artists and those artists no longer alive. In talks with fellow colleagues, curators and friends, Huber feels Latin America is no longer seen as a minority. In her opinion, it has become very active in every country and in every city in the world and it is an important part of the economy. Huber feels it is essential to give visibility to Latin American artists in spaces like art fairs, galleries, museums and institutions. Many feel there has been a void in the art market for contemporary Latin American art. More galleries are now expanding to exhibit Latin American art opening the world to more conversations about art, to more story telling from different backgrounds and linking various cultures together. There is a growing curiosity among individuals regarding Latin American art. Individuals are increasingly seeking to travel to fairs in Latin America to witness and discover the wealth of offerings that this continent presents.
Canadian artist Harold Town (1924-1990), Tyranny of the Corner Puzzle Set,1962, oil and lucite on canvas, 82 x 75 inches, courtesy of Christopher Cutts Gallery
Although most galleries within the Art Fair showcase emerging contemporary artists, there are exceptions like Christopher Cutts Gallery booth A71, who highlights emerging talents such as Alexander Rasmussen alongside the renowned Canadian master Harold Town. Director Christopher Cutts made a noteworthy observation: “They positioned me in a corner this year, so I thought there was no more fitting artwork to display in that corner than Harold Town’s piece titled Tyranny of the Corner Puzzle Set from 1962”.
American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) Cardbird lll, from Cardbird Series (Gemini 305), 1971, offset lithograph and collage with tape on corrugated cardboard, 35 x 35-1/2 inches courtesy Cowley Abbott Art AuctioneersCanadian artist Group of Seven Member Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945) Coal Chute, 1942, oil on board, 38 x 48 inches courtesy Cowley Abbott Art Auctioneers
This year signifies a milestone for innovators Rob Cowley and Lydia Abbott, who are continually expanding the limits of art sales. Together, they operate Cowley Abbott, Canada’s Art Auctioneers, which specializes in showcasing and selling secondary market artworks both regionally and internationally. Their Private Sales section, featured within the auction house and exhibited at the Art Toronto art fair booth A51, highlights Canadian masters such as David Blackwood, A.J. Casson, and Franklin Carmichael, alongside international icons like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Larry Poons.
Rebecca Hossak Art Gallery at Art Toronto booth C54 featuring works by artist Nikoleta Sekulovic (1974-) (left) Alice, 2025, acrylic and oil stick on linen, 78-7/10 x 68-9/10 inches. Nikoleta Sekulovic (1974-) (right) Vanessa Bell,2025, acrylic and oil stick on linen, 84-3/5 x 72-4/5 inches
The Rebecca Hossak Art Gallery, booth C54, located in London, UK, showcases two remarkable artworks by the artist Nikoleta Sekulovic, who was born in 1974 in Rome, Italy, and has German/Serbian heritage. Sekulovic is among the most sought-after artists represented by the gallery. Last year, she presented two pieces at Art Toronto, successfully selling both, and subsequently featured her work at Miami Basel, where several pieces sold out. Sekulovic is a contemporary figurative painter renowned for her vividly conceived portraits that pay tribute to iconic women throughout history. She employs a unique style that she has cultivated, characterized by a contemporary craftsmanship reminiscent of Pre-Raphaelite design.
The art fair offers a wonderful experience for those seeking inspiration and knowledge from the numerous art dealers and artworks displayed.
Braço Perna 44 in Lisbon and Atelier Ghostbirds in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal, D. Dominick Lombardi, curator
The online Oxford Dictionary defines pretending in this way: “speak and act so as to make it appear that something is the case when in fact it is not.” Most of us can still remember playing as a child; dressing, behaving, claiming to be something we were not but hoped to be one day. Some of those pretend characters were the classic princess, an adventurous astronaut or explorer, a ballet dancer, a sneaky spy, or simply a person that operates a car, boat, train or plane. What is common with artists, is that childhood pretend playing often occurred with aspects of drawing, painting or just simply creating in an imagined world that was funneled through the images and installations produced by the pretenders.
(top) Braco Perna 44, Lisbon, Portugal, (bottom) Atelier Ghostbirds, Caldas da Rainha, Portugal
As a child, I clearly remember drawing crazy looking fish on paper, cutting them out and playing with them on the floor as if I was immersed in an underwater world. Luís Almeida remembers making drawings where he would represent what it was like living in an underground world where there were traps, bugs and warring soldiers. He also remembers making drawings of tall buildings with a childhood friend, where the windows would show what was going on inside each floor. When Run Jiang was a child in kindergarten, she remembers drawing a picture of a couple all dressed up and getting married. Soon, other children gathered around asking her to draw one for them, all pretending to be all grown up and getting married. Izumi Ueda Yuu remembers her home in Japan, where there was a window between the living room and the hallway that had many wooden slats. Ueda Yuu used those slats as shelves to display her found treasures: pieces of glass with rounded corners that she picked up on the street, scrap metal, some rusty and some still shiny, dried flowers, seeds, especially large camellia seeds, souvenir wrapping paper, and whirring oil paper as she made installations of those precious things every day in her little private gallery.
As adults, that ability to move into an alternative place that is under control solely by the creator, that form of pretending, is still very much alive in the work of the four artists in the exhibition: Izumi Ueda Yuu, Luís Almeida, Run Jiang and myself.
(Left) Izumi Ueda Yuu, Dreamboat (2024), painting, gouache and collage, 53 x 39 cm, (Right) Izumi Ueda Yuu, River, 2022, Mixed media painting, drawing, Sumi painting, water color, shibori, collage and oil stick, 154 x 118 cm
The art of Izumi Ueda Yuu relates very much to Symbolism in the way it conjures up dreamy narratives through pure, poetic, potent iconography. Everything, every belief, emotion, realization is boiled down to its essence, waiting to re-emerge in the mind and thoughts of the viewer. Once the conversation begins between the art and the viewer, the mysterious spiritual aspect of the art comes forward. The artist’s imagined, created place of make believe is one built of memory, childhood dreams, things that sometimes happen in the periphery that later become central and Ueda Yuu’s art lives in that space where the mind transcends the matter.
(left) Luís Almeida, Pool Johnny (2025), oil on canvas, 200 x 175 cm, (right) Luís Almeida, Crazy Movement (2023), pastel and charcoal on paper, 150 x 140 cm
Luís Almeida’s art goes back and forth between fantastical, heroic imagined worlds to a brutal form of representation. His ability to reveal a mystical imagining overrun with narratives to the simple truth of the absurd or benign aspects of the everyday, all with an element of wild humor is the core of Almeida’s art. A brilliant draftsman and a provider of unadulterated color theory, this artist is still very much connected to that inner child that once ruled all his thoughts. The message here is: “There is no art without total freedom of thought and expression.” A mental state that hinges solely on his ability to leave it all out there for everyone to see.
(left) Run Jiang, Sono (2022), ink marker and watercolor on paper, 32 x 24 cm, (right) Run Jiang, Mixed Dream 3 (2022), charcoal pencil and collage on paper, 73 x 110 cm
Run Jiang’s art is a perfect blend of being and pretending. Jiang’s more colorful works focus on the waking dream state, when one’s thoughts are completely unrelated to one’s physical place. In this instance, Jiang puts forth her own unique way of portraying the multi-planar reality theory whereby previously unseen worlds collide. In her black and white ink drawings which she notes as a Dream series, Jiang brings together lifelong experiences, both real and imagined, into a precious series of vignettes and vistas that can at one moment seem bucolic and the next imperiling.
(left) D. Dominick Lombardi, CCWSI 189 (2025), acrylic, oil, canvas, 60.3 x 45 cm, (right) D. Dominick Lombardi, CCWSI 192 (2025), oil, acrylic medium, magazine page, museum board, 125.4 x 19 cm
In my paintings, I am repurposing the thousands of small drawings I made when most of the world was sheltered in place. For an artist, this state of being sheltered and alone is not so unusual. In fact we crave it. However, the danger that lurked just outside the studio door and windows in the time of the worst COVID days was very imposing. Studying, mining and resolving a few of the numerous, relatively automatic drawings I made back then, recreating them into oil on repurposed canvases or on 1960’s and 70’s printed materials gives me the chance to return back to a time when I pretended everything, one day soon, was going to be okay.
The exhibition “Fingindo ou Fingimento (Pretending),” which will include the work of Izumi Ueda Yuu, Luís Almeida, Run Jiang and myself (D. Dominick Lombardi), will be held at two compelling venues. The first will open on October 30, 2025 at Braço Perna 44 in Lisbon. Run by João Fernandes, Braço Perna 44 is one of the more charming spaces in town, where they always present some of the most visually stimulating, intimate and intriguing art in the capital city of Portugal. Luís Almeida and Run Jiang are represented there. The second venue opens on November 7, 2025 at Atelier Ghostbirds, which is run by Mika Aono. Located in Caldas da Rainha, Atelier Ghostbirds is a formidable and central institution in an area where there are many artists living and working. In addition to eye opening and fun exhibitions, the gallery also offers printmaking workshops and art related events.
All the good things that can be said about a painter have been said about Alex Cameron. Which is not to say that they ought not be said again and again and again. Especially now, after his grievous and entirely unexpected death from a serious fall not far from his Toronto studio last June 17. He was seventy-eight years old.
Much will rightly be said, now and in the future, about Cameron’s pauseless exuberance, about his adventurousness: about his working as a studio assistant to the legendary Jack Bush, about his serving for over a decade as a mechanic for champion Formula 1 and 2 motorcycle racer, Miles Baldwin, about his intrepid voyaging into the wildernesses of Northern Canada and Western Canada, of India and Nepal. Fearless and dashing stuff.
Alex Cameron, Yellow, 2019, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches. Courtesy the Bau-Xi Gallery, Toronto
But while there is a lot to recount about Alex Cameron’s searching, expansive life—as an explorer in a tireless pursuit of colour and vista, form and transcendence—I just can’t bring myself to rehearse much of that bio-stuff here and now. Others will supply all that. For me, all I can think of right now is Alex Cameron and paint, Alex and the utter rapturousness of pigment. The Alex Cameron in my heart right now is the Alex Cameron who once explained to some interviewer that he saw his skies as “colour fields,” noting that he liked having skies in his paintings so that he could “stick stuff in them.” “Stuff” being paint.
I once began a catalogue essay for a Cameron exhibition at Toronto’s Moore Galley called (unhappily, I thought), “2001—A Paint Odyssey” (the Kubrick film had just come out), with a paragraph that I hoped simultaneously introduced and also summarized the kind of painter I felt Cameron was (and was still becoming): “Alex Cameron’s paintings,” I wrote, “are immensely, winningly genial. There is a painterly robustness about them that is remarkably infectious. And while this by no means denies them aesthetic ambition, it does mean that their seriousness lies behind and within the artist’s love of painting for its own sake. To look at a Cameron, to open yourself to one, means there is a good deal of joy to be got through before you come to the core of it—an onerous enough task in the generally repressed hedonism-wary times in which we live” (clearly nothing much has changed over the past quarter century).
Alex Cameron, Purple, 2022, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Bau-Xi Gallery, Toronto
The Cameron paintings I was writing about around this time (2000-2007) were usually large, airy, non-representational works which tended to be made up of painterly dots and swipes, flanges and rinds of colour, feathery sweeps of the brush over his gala surfaces, and a recourse to very hot, strident hues (plummy violets were big with Alex, I remember, and oxidized yellows and roasted tomato reds). Sometimes parts of the canvases were sprayed. I remember being a bit discomfited, though, when The Globe & Mail titled one of my full-tilt articles about Alex (April 21, 2007) “Fauvist Fandango” (newspaper writers do not get to title their own pieces).
Alex Cameron, My Pinery, 2007, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
In a discussion of a big oil painting called “Gabriell’s Wings” from 2001 that I wrote about for the Moore Gallery, I noted that Alex was “A skilled landscape painter when he chose to be (his idea of a good tine is to be helicoptered into the wilderness and set down amongst the bears and beavers to paint the solitude). Cameron,” I continued, “builds his abstractions on a firm footing of landscape-derived shapes—a bright swatch of lake-like horizontality across the bottom of a painting, above which a cheeky, serpentine wobble of pigment, an echo of a far shore, softens you up for entry into the aerial ballet taking place up in the rest of the picture.” I spoke of the “electric agitation” of his pictures. And I made admiring mention of the way Alex would smear paint onto his surfaces with his fingers or “let fly with it so that the deep space of the paintings is galvanized by infinitely small threads and hot wires of pigment—tiny, shrill utterances of hue.”
Eventually, inevitably, the Landscape-Idea shouldered its way decisively forward, informing the stream of vigorous, muscular landscape paintings that would now preoccupy him for the rest of his career.
And remarkable landscapes they always were. Alex gloried in the untouched forest and, in painting after painting, became its scribe, anthologist and, to some degree, its archivist. This latter tendency actually used to give me pause sometimes. The fact is, Alex painted trees so vividly and convincingly they were themselves—or so I thought—beginning to encroach, as an almost documentary subject, upon the progress of his painting qua painting.
Alex seemed to sense this himself. And he gradually began throttling up the paintings so that the contretemps between his beloved subject (trees) and his handling of them (in daring acts of pigment) turned increasingly into a virtuoso tussle than a dutiful homage.
Which is to say that just when the paintings were on the edge of becoming too nakedly arboreal, Alex began using the trees—the forest skyline—as his armature upon which to drape and generally festoon his increasingly writhing and tumultuous attacks of pigment. The artist’s forest increasingly became trees, not as they could be taxonomically described, but as they were felt—as purely visual objects in a scintillating visual field, as gloriously life-enhancing vectors thrusting up into the painterly light.
Alex Cameron, The Crashing Plane, 2020-2022, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Bau-Xi Gallery
It strikes me that these descriptions of Alex’s excitingly lush and scrappy production of big sinewy wilderness paintings might position him, in the minds of people who didn’t know him, as a big, brawny, rather Paul Bunyan-esque figure, bestriding the waiting landscape like a colossus. The truth is, Alex was a slight, tensile, quick and rather elfin man—with a boyish grin so infectious it was almost impossible not to see something leprechaunish in him.
While this enjoyable, mercurial joie-de-vivre was a sort of admirable constant in Alex’s life, he endured a number of distressing medical events which might well have stilled and silenced a less perpetually resilient man. I remember an afternoon in which painter David Bolduc—Alex’s best friend and mine too—and I were chatting at a Toronto coffee shop we liked called Il Gatto Nero (it was maybe 2007 or 2008) when Alex came to join us. I remember how, during one gregarious moment, he causally mentioned that he had just suffered a slight stroke which had left him with a strange floating rectangle of pure white blocking his eye—I think it was his right eye. David and I were distressed, but Alex gave us the impression that he would simply soldier cheerfully on, seeing the world around this intrusive white spot. I can’t recall his ever mentioning it again. Then, in 2012, he suffered a much more serious strokewhich left him entirely unable to use his right arm. Anyone else might have given up painting in despair. Alex being Alex, however, he simply set about learning how to paint with his left arm alone.
Not only did this would-be deprivation not appear to alter or diminish Alex’s progress as a painter, the paintings he would make from 2012 until his death this year would be the most brawny, restless, opulent and downright ecstatic of his career. His trees and lakes commingled exuberantly with his clouds and skies until each of his canvases shuddered and heaved with convulsive, painterly life. These later canvases grabbed you by the lapel and shook you until your sensibility rattled.
Look at a painting like My Dad’s Forest (2015) or the exquisite Colours (also from 2015). Pictures like these offer—just as a technical feat—the best, most virtuoso paint-handling I’ve seen in Canadian painting for decades. Look hard at them and your eyes will never be the same.
The late Camerons are not so much landscapes as paintscapes. If the wilderness is in peril (and when is it not?), then Alex Cameron would try to brush it back to life.
He loved to paint. And now his paintings will live for him.
byD. Dominick Lombardi, curator and participating artist
September 6 to November 16, 2025 Hammond Museum & Japanese Stroll Garden
Cary Leibowitz, Painting is Not Dead? Painting is Dead? (1998), marker on found photographs, 10 x 16 inches, 11 x 17 x 1 inches framed
Humor in Contemporary Art is a funny thing. Seriously. An exhibition with humor as its specific theme is not something you often see in galleries or museums. There have been exceptions over the years, where artists like Saul Steinberg, who straddled the two worlds of fine and commercial art with his many brilliant The New Yorker Magazine covers; and the outlandish works of Marisol Escobar and H. C. Westermann who have their own unique brand of humor, can be seen in museums throughout the world – artists that would not have been as successful without the recognition of their wit and humor. Today, some form of humor, albeit on the darker side, can be experienced in the contemporary works of numerous well known artists such as Carroll Dunham, Sarah Lucas, Barbara Kruger, Peter Saul, Erwin Wurm and last, but definitely not least, Maurizio Cattelan, who all have varying levels of dark humor in their creations.
Maurizio Cattelan, A Perfect Day (1999)
The title of this exhibition, “You Think That’s Funny?,” comes from an email conversation I had with Mike Cockrill, one of the artists in the exhibition, who has been toying with the limits of humor in art since forever. He sees humor and the extent of what can be publicly tolerated as a satisfying challenge. He, like many of the artists in the exhibition, presents us with something to make us laugh privately, but maybe feels a bit uncomfortable when expressed in the public realm.
The artists selected for this exhibition have accepted the fact that there is humor in their art. Using a variety of media, styles, references and messaging, they all have created narrative art that should make visitors at the very least smile, or at times laugh out loud. What is also important to note is the substance beyond the initial humor. Humor only goes so far, so while these artists have your attention you can appreciate the abilities and techniques used in the fabrication of their very intriguing work.
(left) Todd Colby, To the Future (2024), acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches; (right) Peregrine Honig, Wonky Donkey (2006), pen and ink, Gum Arabic, pigment on Strathmore, 10 ½ x 10 ½ x 1 ½ inches, all images courtesy of the artists
Todd Colby uses words and images to create weirdly symbolic, diaristic mixed media collages, paintings and sticker commentary that all have substantive impact. As a poet, writer and visual artist, Colby blends an endless series of investigative thoughts and images ignited by keen observations that, when added to a common surface, shed a humorous light on the often brazen and hard to bear new realities in our current sociocultural and political landscape. Peregrine Honig also utilizes words and images to create humorous vignettes, however in this instance, Honig’s art is more specific and far more intimate. Working with pen and ink, Gum Arabic and pigment on paper, Honig presents previously innocent stuffed animals in far more mature social situations that many adults can easily relate to. In doing so, humor is maintained, but in a very different light, whereby the source of one’s distinct personality traits, positive and negative, can be traced back to one’s early days at play.
(left) Rita Valley, WTF (2019), mixed materials: silk brocade, vinyl, satin, paracord. 48 x 47 inches; (right) Norm Magnusson, Horse (2025), archival computer print, 24 x 18 inches
Rita Valley is fed up with the state of our union. Utilizing her skills with fabric and fringes, Valley gets right to the point as she confronts the viewer with familiar terms of dissent. Using fancy patterns, shiny surfaces and heavily textured accents, Valley projects a passionate belief system that is being attacked on all sides. However, at first glance, the feeling one may get from her art is one of a universal, reactionary-type of humor, pulling the viewer in, as they think more deeply about what is hounding their own worlds. The art of Norm Magnusson reveals a multi-pronged approach to humor that varies between county fair controversy and lowbrow art bombs to more serious issues regarding our collective state of mind. Magnusson is a master at pairing words and images, contrasting references and recognising timely subliminal links that creep up on you unexpectedly. Magnusson constantly reminds us to stay engaged and to look at the world with both delight and suspicion.
(left) Judy Haberl, Sausages (2020-25), jewelry, pearls, sausage casings, acrylic medium, sizes variable; (right) Bret DePalma, Art Ham (2024), acrylic,collage on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
Judy Haberl grew up in a home where food was often extremely experimental, as her father advised NASA on their “food in space program…”. Her family ate “…dehydrated foods to test for edibility,” which were usually godawful, as these early experiences with laboratory food still influences her art to this day. Included in this exhibition are her humorous sausage casings filled with faux jewelry, and witty Baby Cakes made of colored Hydrostone as she reminds us that it’s all getting too far afield from wholesome whole foods. Bret DePalma pushes his narratives well past reason. Nothing fits, yet it all works once his paintings are completed. No color, perspective, symbol or representation is off the table, as he weaves through uncharted spaces that sweep across his mind. The humor, which is very complex and layered, begins slowly and tentatively as the viewer comes to terms with what is in front of them as they wonder where all this wizardry comes from.
(left) Susan Meyer, Maggie, 2025, wood, foam, acrylic, Apoxie Sculpt, paint, 2 x 3 inches; (right) Jeff Starr, Landolakes (2024), acrylic, marker on paper, 15 x 13 inches
Susan Meyer’s sculptures have a B-movie type futuristic look to them that feels timid in one way and grandiose in another. A bold mix of emotions that gives her work a unique sort of humor that is subtle but effective. This is not to say that there is no depth here, there is, and much of it as exemplified by elements of High Modernism as a distinct placeholder, especially with respect to the aesthetic, while the presentation of materials in their curious shapes and colors adds contrasting notes of frivolity and seriousness. Jeff Starr creates mixed media paintings that feature multiplanar realities. These planes, which could not be more different, shift back and forth between an idealized ‘real world’ and an imagined astral plane that transcends what is considered normal processing of space and time. This overlapping of universes forms a visually halting transition, perhaps the way alien space travelers may perceive our world on their terms, focusing more on unknown elements we can not see, while turning the whole thing into an absurd visual conversation.
(left) Jim Kempner, The $6 Million Dollar Banana Split, video, running time 5:33; (right) Cary Leibowitz, Cubism? (1998), marker on found photograph, 8 x 10 inches, 11 ¼ x 9 ¼ x 1 ¼ inches framed
Jim Kempner, a well known, decades long art dealer on the corner of 23rd Street and 10th Avenue in New York City’s Chelsea District, is one of the more colorful individuals on the scene. A passionate purveyor of prints, sculptures, drawings and paintings, Kempner sees the humor in his daily reality and does something about it. His seven season video series, The Madness of Art, is a much needed breath of fresh air, a break from the austere atmosphere NYC galleries too often project when coming face to face with the general public. Cary Leibowitz uses words masterfully, and we never know if he is being cheeky or in the middle of a crippling crisis. Or is it both? Either way, Leibowitz’s art will forever stir things up by disrupting the viewer’s typical train of thought. Whether it’s cute stuffed animals, symbolic ceramics, intricately cut placards, pennants, paintings, shopping bags or an all out outdoor installation, Leibowitz leaves us with an indelibly blazing, bold and unexpected mark on many things searingly sociopolitical to the brilliantly benign.
(left) Mike Cockrill, The Door (2013), acrylic on canvas, 46 x 36 inches; (right) Mary Bailey, Pox – Let’s Go Viral (2025), wood, acrylic paint, 5 x 2 ½ x ⅞ inches
Mike Cockrill’s art portrays feelings of hopelessness, futility, ecstasy or enlightenment. Using easily recognizable figures like clowns and the typical office worker stuck on a never ending wheel to nowhere, Cockrill strikes at the heart of the circumstances he presents in ways that will make the viewer smile or laugh at first, until the weight of the situation breaks through. After that, it’s back to the humor in a continuous cycle of responses that would never be as potent if not for the clever, straightforward, high quality of Cockrill’s art. Mary Bailey’s primary medium is painted or scribed wood that, when messages or symbols are added, has anywhere from unique tinges of Surrealism to a persuasive form of Pop. In her most recent series of symbolic cigarette packages, Bailey sends powerful socio-political statements utilizing her own brand of dark humor to make her point, concerns that are growing more and more troubling every new day. In the end, Bailey dives deep into realities that are best served with a little humor or all is lost.
(left) Cathay Wysocki, Expeller of Erroneous Thought (2022) acrylic, collage, sand, glitter, beads on canvas 20 x 16 inches; (right) D. Dominick Lombardi, CC 113 UC (The Impossibility of a Skinned Knee) (2021), sand, papier-mâché, gesso, acrylic medium and objects, 11 1/2 x 12 x 9 inches
Cathy Wysocki makes art that swings back and forth between fear and fantasy. Wild colors and crazy narratives somehow make everything oddly copacetic. The limits of which are stretched to the breaking point in every imaginable way. Hideous/Beauteous comes to mind here as Wysocki weaves her way through highly textured surfaces where emotions run raw and rampant propelled by a limitless and lively aesthetic. Very often in my paintings and sculptures, humor is presented as a prompt or a reward for looking at the art. With the sculpture CC 113 UC (The Impossibility of a Skinned Knee) (2021), I take a shot at the art world in general, and Damian Hirst specifically by making reference to his most famous early work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) where a tiger shark is suspended in a clear glass and steel tank filled with a 5% solution of formaldehyde.
Adam Niklewicz, ERWIN (2024), cardboard box, rubber boot, 30 x 12 x 14 inches
Adam Niklewicz joins the fun with ERWIN (2024), an homage to the outrageous sculptures and photographs of Erwin Wurm. Like Wurm, Niklewicz often pairs absurdly unlike objects in penetrating ways to twist, confuse and delight – it’s physical comedy in 3D, yet there is something deeper and darker looming in the unconscious here. It’s called unencumbered imagining, free association, the ability to literally think outside the box and get excited about some of the most banal objects of the day-to-day.
“…but it is extremely difficult to watch oneself working….”
–Xavier deMaistre, Voyage Around My Room, 1794.
Q: When did you first paint?
A: In 1952, when I was twelve. My friend, Robert Nunn and I walked to the edge of the St. Lawrence river (we lived in Kingston) and despoiled a canvas board each. His despoiling was better than mine; his painting was bolder, louder and more decisive than mine. He was a barely pubescent Vlaminck or Derain. My painting was timid, abashed. It was a timidity, a diffidence, I then set about to outgrow.
Q: When did you first exhibit?
A: In lots of momentary, glancing-blow places, but my first SERIOUS exhibition was in 1983, at the Jane Corkin Gallery in Toronto. It was a big show of works on Paper. I was forty-three and in the throes of teaching and writing about art—other peoples’ art.
Writer turned painter: Gary Michael Dault; the former art critic for The Star; shown here with his painting Burnished Day or Conch Of The Voice (mixed media; 1983) opened his one-man show at the Jane Corkin Gallery yesterday. The show runs until April 23.
Q: Let’s jump ahead about 40 years. How did your summer-long exhibition at the Periphery come about?
A: Entirely through the kindness and courtliness—the agency—of architect, artist and musician Dimitri Papatheodorou, for whom the Periphery is both a country home and a six-acre estate-wide workshop near the pastoral, pixilated village of Warkworth, Ontario. Papatheodorou describes the Periphery as a landscape containing visual art, music, performance and architecture, seeing it as a “time-based project” where he pursues his painting (in the exquisite new studio he has recently designed and had built) and, in a spacious gallery next to it, mounts summer-long exhibitions of some artist whose work he likes (last summer’s exhibition was of paintings by Toronto-based artist Greg Angus).
Q: What makes up your Periphery exhibition?
A: It’s in two parts. The first is a small retrospective, a mounting of a dozen works on paper from 2005 to 2015. The second part, titled Passatempi, Painting in the Meantime, is a wall-sized array of about 75 recent small paintings (acrylic with collage) on rough hunks of raw cardboard, some of them (my favourites) only a few inches wide.
Q: What are they like?
A: They’re muscular and messy, wildly gestural, impatient, ecstatic, frenetic and as far as I’m concerned, almost unbearably beautiful. They make my chest tight.
Q: They are, as you say, awfully small. Why?
A: Because they are painted on very small pieces of throwaway cardboard—distaff, disreputable, ignoble shardsof cardboard, a lot of which come to me as the wrappings around books I’ve ordered or the boxes some foodstuffs like pasta come in. I save them all for painting. I love cardboard. I like its used look. It has a history.
Q: When do you paint?
A: Between writing poems. Which is to say, all the time.
Q: How long do you spend on a painting?
A: About 2-3 minutes. 5 minutes tops.
Q: What’s the rush?
A: I’m getting old. I’m eighty-five now.
Q: That’s the reason?
A: Nah. In fact, I’ve always worked that way. Back in 2010, when I was exhibiting my 1 Minute Cereal Box Landscapes everywhere, each one of them took me only a minute apiece. I’d make a whole exhibition in an hour. Labouring over a painting is okay, I guess, if you’re Magritte or somebody.
Q: What do you like about these rapid-fire cardboards?
A: Their hecticity, the rush of them, the meaning (sometimes august, symbolic and even mythic) that always—always—emerges from them. Not one of them is ever non-representational. And yet not one of them knows where it’s going when it starts out.
Q: What if you make a mistake?
A: I can’t. If a painting begins not to work—to bore me, for example—I subject it to some cleansing, cataclysmic event, like a sluicing of white paint—and then I start in to fix it. I haven’t lost one yet.
Q: How did you decide on their installation?
A: Dimitri did that. He’s an architect. He has a perfect sense of form.
