ART: Maximum Jose

[eye WEEKLY]

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eye WEEKLY October 10, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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ART ART

MAXIMUM JOSE

Cafe Bernate, 1024 Queen St. W.

by
OLIVER GIRLING

"Frau Mit Auslander" --Woman with Foreigner -- was a provocative
series of paintings by Walter Dahn in the '80s. "Foreigner" is a word
that's largely disappeared from languages all over the world, for good
reason. It carries with it the baggage of racism, xenophobia and
exclusion of the perceived "other," the virus of potential infection.

We'd rather speak of tourists, refugees, immigrants, students,
dignitaries; by recognizing which category of stranger we're talking
about, we dignify the object of our speech.

But in our benevolence, we lose the exoticism, the irresponsible
orientalism, as well as the legitimate distinguishing function of the
word, as everybody's life is subsumed in a homogenous social jelly.

Strangers have sometimes been blessed with the gift of waking up a
culture to itself, and Jose Springer's exhibition at Cafe Bernate aims
to do nothing less. It's an intriguing show by the Mexican painter and
critic; all the paintings produced since his arrival in Toronto.

The pictures are small, which is nothing unusual to audiences familiar
with, say, the recent Third Rail artists' festival in Parkdale, but
certainly novel with respect to the commercial galleries, where "big"
and "ambitious" have long been synonymous. Modestly though they come
on, they're subtle, requiring a concentrated viewing. They don't
announce the fact --you have to figure it out.

Their sizes have nothing to do with miniaturization: these are the
right dimensions for the work. Many begin with a found painting, from
an antique store or the Salvation Army, which Springer uses as a
ground on which to build other elements. I'm reminded of Peter
Schuyff's similar approach of a few years back. But where Schuyff's
series was triumphalist, a random application of his trademark
geometric squiggles to found art, Springer seems actually fascinated
by the contents of what he's found, even foregrounding the other
artist's signature. His additions feel complementary, rather than
jarring to the original.

Yet he reclaims each one, suffusing it with his own painterly
atmospherics. And these, to the eye of the Canadian viewer, are
emphatically strange. It's not only that they refer to some
particularly Mexican painting traditions, like the folk-art "retablos"
-- small votive pictures produced by amateurs requesting divine
intercession. (The painter Frida Kahlo had a large collection.) It's
that they posit another set of possibilities for depicted space than
the ones we're used to -- ours generally involve choosing between
"flat" and "illusionistic." If I read him right, Springer has an idea
of imaginary space that's collaborative, neither literal nor
fictitious. A fusing of the original artist's intentions, as
symbolized by the picture, with a secondary gloss, achieved by adding
to it.

In House On Fire, for example, it takes a minute to notice that the
house occupying an interior rectangle in the middle of the painting is
burning, because the erupting volcano behind it steals focus. This
scene has been overpainted on what seems to be a dramatic sundown, an
autumnal landscape with a figure in the foreground. The figure could
very well be the artist, working outdoors, depicting a scene from his
imagination rather than from observed reality: the blue, light palette
of the interior rectangle is contrary to the orange sky framing it.
Yet the sequence of all the fires is in synch: translucent billows
from the house, opaque clouds from the volcano, the blazing sky of
sundown -- imaginary and real space intersect in the middle of the
picture. It's signed GeLLi, which somehow seems oddly appropriate.

I've described this piece in some detail because there are
implications in it for content -- the way these pictures create
meaning. Springer has said that the burning house is Mexico itself.
Whether or not this reading is readily available, it's consistent with
the way all the work in this exhibition creates large implications
from the conjunction of apparently simple parts. Magritte does
something similar, especially in his fascination with the still-life
genre, which he shares with Springer, but he's more academic. There's
more here of what's unstated: a belief in pictorial magic through
juxtaposition, achievable against the odds.

It makes me realize how little we know of the art of our own
hemisphere. Springer's eloquent little show brings Torontonians word
from the Americas.

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