After the previous post on Allyson Mitchell’s Ladies Sasquatch, we’re moving right along to the McMaster Museum’s Panabaker Gallery and alumnus Matthew Varey’s exhibition Building on History, accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with an essay by another McMaster alumnus, Gary Michael Dault.

And for anyone scratching their heads going “Wait, didn’t we talk about Matthew Varey not that long ago?” The answer is yes, we did. Matthew’s been a busy boy, seeing as he had a solo at transit gallery last October and has yet another show currently open at XEXE Gallery in Toronto.

Detail from Growing up in Hamilton

Reading back on my blog entry on Growing Up in Hamilton, I found I was (perhaps unsurprisingly) a tad harsh, largely out of frustration with what I saw as an excessive cacophony of mark-making on surfaces that could have been far more elegant given the sheer lusciousness of his colour choices and handling of paint. You can see it in that detail up there, and Varey lets that quality speak for itself in many of the works in Building on History. The compositions are striking and simple: black silhouettes of towering edifices against heavy charged sweeps of sky.

Much of the painterly weight is given over to these glowing (and in some cases, downright sparkly) grounds that serve as the backdrop to grim towering forms that are almost insubstantial in their two-dimensional rendering - more the idea of towers than the things themselves. And yes, for the record, I have recently done a seasonal re-read of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which happens to be a real cracker of a novel with at least two remarkable black towers - one a collective dream, the other non-existent save for a vertical absence of light in Venice. In some ways, Varey’s towers are more in keeping with that uncanny quality.

Promise (dolmen), 2008, 48 x 48 inches

Some images, like Promise (dolmen), are more explicitly historicized than others - I’ll let the obvious speak for itself here and simply remark that these linear interruptions - comets, rockets, what have you - are a common motif in many of the Building on History paintings. Whatever the uncertain identities of these towers, they exist in the sort of cosmology that cuts through space; under threat, their fortified, bunker-like mentality starts to make more sense.

Matthew Varey, Building on History, continues until March 21. You’ve got a bit less time left to check out Bad Weather at XEXE Gallery - that one closes February 21.

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