Big Expectations

Two artists making large scale statements

Lorraine Simms and Renee Lavaillante at Galerie La Centrale, 1992

When thinking about art, size makes a difference. It adds a new dimension of physicality to a work, calling attention to itself. Even the process of painting is different from how smaller works are created. Making a large painting can involve big body movements, like doing a dance, where the finger work used for small areas is more like writing or playing an instrument. Viewers also get pulled into the dance, stepping back to take in the whole large canvas, then going up close to look at a detail, or at least to read the label.

With these paintings by Lorraine Simms, it's advisable not to read the labels at all until you've looked at every picture. You should even put down this review, and read no further until you've seen the show. You see, she plays games with the viewer. The objects in her large paintings look bizarre and beautiful. They're painted in a completely realistic style, in fact they're still lifes, traditional right down to the textured finish. But the subjects look like props from science fiction movies: they seem to be ordinary things, but wrong in almost every way.

One pink thing with tubes looks like a skinned set of bagpipes. Next to this is something else which might be a blue soup ladle as interpreted by Henry Moore.

These aren't surrealist fantasies. As the titles prove, they are real objects of an almost embarrassingly intimate nature. "Left Side of Artificial Heart" is the first picture. "Duo-Condylar Knee Prosthesis" the second.

The size of the pictures leads us astray, as do the colours, which were invented by the artist. But realising their true nature calls up a host of questions, associations, and ideas. The recent controversy about implants, for instance. The hard, chrome (male?) technology invading the soft, perishable (female?) body. Is the human body like a Toyota, for which you can order spare parts at Canadian Tire? What happens to our spirituality?

The advantage of painting over print (such as what you're reading here) is that all of these questions can be brought up in the mind, or can lie beneath the surface while we see the pure image itself. One picture shows a transparent column with what looks like a halo around the top. Just because it's a penis implant doesn't make it any less beautiful.

Renee Lavaillante's drawings are large because they have to contain her energy. She never knows what a series of pictures will look like when she starts them. She simply begins, layering on a whole variety of media: chalk, charcoal, acrylic and poster paint (black and white only) in her habitual short calligraphic strokes. Her drawing she likens to writing, discovering images and relations as she goes along.

What does she end up with? (The hardest thing about doing this kind of art is knowing when to stop.) Four large images (chosen from a series of seven) resembling big wounded buffalo lying on their sides. They're really like blots in a psychiatric test, letting you see whatever you want to read into them. But whichever way you look, there's always that feeling of shaggy power.

Lavaillante understands the pictures in her own way, where the drawings represent communication and power relations between individuals. Her idea is clearest in a diptych she's set up where two blobs face each other. The things which were legs now become tentacles which strain, but don't quite reach, to the blob on the other side.

She calls her series "Les Appelants," which means "The Callers," but also "The Decoys," something false to lure us in. Like the illusion of desire, as she says. Really, her pictures are huge "concrete poems," meaning that the shape the words take on the page is as important as the words themselves. But the words are written in Lavaillante's personal alphabet, which not even she can read once she's finished.

Links to Galleries in Montreal

Copyright (c) Jack Ruttan, 2003