Killing Time and Tuesdays on Queen West

An interesting point to bear in mind when an impromptu day trip into Toronto gives one time to drop into Toronto’s Queen West art district - many, many of these spaces seem to think the week starts on Wednesday. I’m well familiar with the notion of closed-on-Mondays in contemporary galleries, but Tuesday as well? Seriously, people, that’s a bit much. Both myself and two gentlemen were stood outside Angell Gallery at the same bloody time, gripped by the gorgeous Luke Painter drawing in the window but unable to get in because, oh, it’s Tuesday.

So what was open? Well, MOCCA for starters.

John Brown’s The Visceral THING is a survey of his many, many abstract paintings. I do appreciate the things that happen at the edges of his surfaces, particularly when he achieves a strange vertical tension through the pull of a single colour dripping from the upper to lower edge of the canvas. Other common strategies of his leave me less enthralled - his tendency to build webs of small brushmarks into his shapes leaves an annoying impression of flatness, neither chaotic nor varied enough to build energy, nor tidy enough to imply a system at work.

Overall, I was far more content with Hungarian artist Balint Zsako’s exhibition of drawings. They weren’t universally awesome - a bit too much simplistic, empty erotic content for my own taste - but the overall emphasis on hybrid forms rendered in exquisite ink work certainly plucked a personal chord. His somewhat tribal figures tend to merge together, literally (i.e. sexually) or else are figuratively connected by intricately rendered threads - which are, ultimately, simply wonderful little love poems to line itself. When he’s at his best, the ink itself is allowed greater play, its liquid qualities making ghosts of its subject matter. And given how many works were on display in such a modest space, I can forgive the occasional lapse in visual interest when the overall virtuosity of his practice is so evident in the big picture.

My search for more galleries that were actually open today brought me around the corner to Gallery TPW. Its neighbour, XPACE, looked to be in the midst of a messy-looking installation effort, but TPW’s Artur Zmijewski exhibition was open, albeit strangely unmanned. This was my first visit to this space, so I’m not sure if they typically have anything in the way of invigilation - as it happened, there was something really interesting in the experience of walking into a completely abandoned, low-lit space where two videos are playing on their self-perpetuating loops. If anything, it adds to the sinister quality of his cultural experiments, especially in Them/Sie, a video documenting a disastrous workshop exercise in mural-making among various Polish cultural groups. I’m not usually a fan of politics in art, but this particular piece has managed to eliminate the explicit preaching that usually turns me off such efforts; instead, we’re confronted with real people starting out with good intentions but becoming increasingly vicious with each others’ ideological murals to the point of setting fire to the freshly-applied paint.

It’s a disturbing spectacle in many ways, but strangely reassuring all the same in showing just how deep an investment in the visual can run. That sort of intensity of reaction would not have happened if these rather ordinary people didn’t cherish the images that define them - for an artist, that does carry a backward kind of hope, really.

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