Atelier Suárez, Belgo Building #325

As you enter the space you are aware that this is something different. It is not a white formal cube. You might even be a little confused. You’ll stop in your tracks for a moment, trying to figure out if you are welcome or trespassing. At the entrance, you are greeted by 4 large scale paintings and as you look around the space, you see a chair with some clothes on it, white socks and high heels on the floor below it, red candles burning, a wig and with the corner of your eye you notice a blue shirt hanging on a hanger. Right in front of you, there is a big blue painting. A man is standing with his back to you, in a blue bathroom, brightly lit by the sun coming through a window. Does the shirt belong to the man depicted? He is naked and is taking a step towards the sink. You are witnessing an intimate moment and you are unsure if your presence is known or not. Will he be surprised if he turns around? Are you allowed in? 

These are the questions the viewer is facing in this show. What For My Maddened Heart I Most Was Longing presented in Atelier Suárez, is Kara Eckler’s first solo show in Montreal, which displays works spanning two decades. The title comes from Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite translated to English by William Hyde Appleton. In the hymn Sappho treats themes of love, devotion, desire, religion, and heartbreak, Kara Eckler’s show touches upon themes of intimacy, sexuality, eroticism, and mysticism. There are ten large scale paintings on the walls and 16 smaller pieces that are presented off the wall. The space around them is filled with familiar objects like lingerie, bottles, candles, ropes, bags, shoes, and wigs which complement the work. This presentation heightens your awareness that these paintings are part of lived reality, they are the artist’s experiences. In this show, you can’t help but feel a little voyeuristic, shy, and awkward, facing things that are usually kept private.

Sex and intimacy so often stay behind closed doors, in password protected folders, in erased browser histories and whispers. However it is also an important element of our human experience that we cannot ignore. Kara Eckler courageously opens up, allows you to witness her and her loved ones, which hopefully prompts you to open up in return. The nudity isn’t shocking as one might expect, it’s vulnerable and real. It isn’t the lustful gaze of a voyeur, searching scenes that titillate, but the loving gaze of a participant, someone who shared these moments. You are privileged to be invited into the world of those depicted. 

Two narratives emerge in the show, the one of the painted world and the one of the real life objects. These objects play a double role, some are a way into the painting, an element that comes to life and allows you to understand what is happening, others present a riddle. In the forefront of The Witches’ Sabbath, which depicts two female figures reclining in bed, you see a wine bottle and a glass, you’ll notice the same dark glass bottle, right underneath the painting, sitting on the floor, like a relic of moments past. On the floor by Watching, Waiting, Waking, a dark red canvas, depicting a reclining female and a small, curled up male figure in the background, you see a candelabra. Are these candles here for illumination or part of a magic ritual? You notice the female figure’s harness and the hint of wings on the male. The piece feels both calm and eerily gloomy, as if the two are stuck in some sort of wasteland or limbo. The uncertainty you feel about the meaning of this piece is repeated in others and heightened through surreal elements of extra limbs, doubling, recurring characters, and fantastical elements throughout the show.

Kara Eckler’s foray into mysticism started early. In 2002, after receiving her BFA in Painting and a BA in Creative Writing in Albany, NY, she moved to Canada to study Tantra and meditation. You can clearly feel the influence of that, both in the paintings as well as the presentation.

Kara Eckler has undeniable skill and ability to paint in an idiosyncratic way. You can connect to her works through their humanity and vulnerability as well as by appreciating the beauty of putting oil paint to canvas. She is striving to show the viewer the reality she has witnessed or participated in, but she is also allowing her medium to enhance that. She is not here to spell out everything for you. She might render a plant, a glass, a foot, a breast, but she is also allowing the freshness of a quick first layer to show in a hand, a window, or a bed. These painterly moments make you wonder, is this a memory or a fantasy? Are those your memories and fantasies? 

In the middle of the room stands a painter’s stool, with coils of rope and a paintbrush, which feel like metaphors of the themes of the show. The brush points to a visible love for painting, particularly oil painting. Large canvases, bold thick brush strokes, saturated colours, and human figures almost life size are the hallmarks of a painter in love with the medium. Rope on the stool that we see tied as a pentagram harness in The Witching Hour remind us of power exchange practices, magic, rituals of binding and constricting, but also the incredible need to trust the world and to let go, just as a painter does in the studio.

What For My Maddened Heart I Most Was Longing is a bold challenge thrown at the viewer. The taboo surrounding the themes explored might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is undeniably daring to open yourself up as Kara Eckler does. These paintings depict nudity, sex, and mystical practices. The scale is imposing, the people real. No-one is hiding under the hairless, peach coloured, blended skin of french academicism. What you see, is what was lived. 

Liza Sokolovskaya

La Forêt sâ€en vient II
June 10-July 1 2017

Christian Messierâ€s exhibition, la Forêt sâ€en vient II, or The Forest is Coming II, is a presentation of an exhibition organized by Galerie Verticale that was held in the new lobby of Salle André-Mathieu in Laval, which is intended to “professionalize their visual arts presentation”. This series of works was removed amidst some controversy earlier this year due to several complaints from the public after visiting the hall for a Bruno Pelletier show. The organizers demanded that six paintings be removed, to which, after a lengthy period of debate, Messier responded that the entire show must be taken down, asserting by an all or nothing policy that they are a whole not to be divided. These works on view at Galerie Laroche Joncas were displayed as they were intended to be exhibited, uncensored. The theme of proposals from which his work was chosen for the show in Laval was “the strange, humour and the grotesque”, presumably a response to the frequent stand-up comedy shows performed at the hall. Ironically, comedy shows gain nearly all of their popularity through bawdy humour, taboo, and controversial topics, but apparently, some nudity in the hall on the way to the show was too much for some visitors to bear, or at least for the Pelletier crowd. The six paintings which were censored did not feature simple classical nudity, as some of Messierâ€s works in this series resemble, such as the canvas of figures cavorting in an elegant circle la Matisseâ€s dancers. Instead, it was the works which displayed any semblance of sexuality, through the groping of breasts, implied orgies or sexual activity that the ones which stimulated complaint.

This series of paintings centers on the notion of the forest as a wild place, far from an experience of a landscape viewed at a remove. It plays on notions of the forest as where things become strange, uncontrollable, and people behave differently. The forest has long been a metaphor for wildness, danger, and chaos from throughout literature and parable. From Lord of the Flies to Lord of the Rings and Little Red Riding Hood, we are warned of the dangers of straying off the path, going a little too crazy, having too much fun. Messierâ€s characters gleaned from internet images and screenshots from YouTube videos, explore what happens in just such cases in a way that is ambiguous and stimulates the imagination. Voodoo rituals, dancing parties, and exhibitionistic displays abound all in a mood of mystery, absurdity and release.

Messier is an artist who works in performance as well as painting; he has an artistic practice of twenty years and an active exhibition and performance history throughout Quebec and beyond. His works often deal with the body in states of extremity, both his own body and in the characters he paints. His performance art conjures up Samuel Beckettâ€s plays in a way, in their repetitive and seemingly pointless nature, and the strain they bring on the performer and the viewer through sympathy. He is often dressed in suits that seem too large for his frame, somehow adding poignancy to the trials he puts himself through. Messier performs acts of torment on his body, from beating his chest until exhaustion to dangerously riding a papier-mâché steed which he lit on fire, to shoving a whole raw onion in his mouth, causing tears to fall in the rain, to throwing himself as well as chairs across the room and so on. Watching, we are both mesmerized and filled with repulsion.

Why are artists so fascinated with the body? It is the medium for the expression of our existence, the essential material, the most raw. It is the thing we create with, when we can create with nothing else, we create ourselves. We create progeny, we make food, we excrete. The body is unavoidable, inescapable, except in death. It is a mirror for artistic production, one that we must eventually leave behind—both the mirror itself and whatever we manage to produce, even if all that is an aged and defunct form. Artists draw our attention to this, our constant companion, best friend, and ubiquitous jailer. They remind us of the nature of incorporation, and what we can never forget, our mortality, as much as we may try.

Through both his performances and his paintings, it is clear that Christian Messier is interested in what happens when the limits of the body are pushed to breaking point, to the point when emotion explodes, to the point that the physical vessel is in danger.  His 2016 show at Clark Centre, I am the God of Hellfire, and I bring you…fire, dealt with dual themes of the experience of drugs and demonic possession, exploring a  body taken over by a foreign agent. A spirit in a body is a takeover of flesh, and we all struggle with issues of incorporation, of inhabitation of our physical frame. Messierâ€s work, at its best, strongly conjures these issues. What happens when we lose control? Who are we then? Who are we in a primal state, at our most bestial? When we have been taken over by another force through drug use, demonic possession or raw emotion, are we more or less ourselves?

While I have not had the opportunity to view Messierâ€s oeuvre extensively in person, I saw his last show at Laroche Joncas, and although I found it admirable, la Forêt sâ€en vient II is a leap forward since his previous solo exhibition there. This show is conceptually and visually strong, with themes running through the works which take the viewer on a psychedelic and ritualistic journey along with him. And the ride has some interesting sights. It begins with a painting called Aurore Boréale, which features mischievous, lucid and brightly-coloured characters which could emerge from a David Lynch film, leering before a Northern Light sky, perhaps a hallucinogenic trip is beginning. This work has its own distinctive character, and that is dark, to be sure, but it is also playful and funny. In these works is clear that something naughty is going on, or about to, but youâ€re not sure what. And you feel sort of like a transgressive voyeur for even looking. In Paradise liebe, busty women cavort around a fire with a well-hung black man, while in Animal Lovers, a man proportioned like a Sumo wrestler gleefully smiles while either hanging onto his cascading rolls or groping for what is well-hidden beneath them while watching two figures engaging in ambiguously ritualistic or sensual activities. You get the sense that some suburbanites drank the wrong punch at the barbecue and the night just went awry. The bestial nature of humanity is revealed, but not explained. Messier seems to imply that is there, seething beneath the surface, waiting for the right circumstances to bring it out.

La bascule, meaning “rocker”, shows a lovely subtlety of blues, greens, and greys, the lines of the hair of the woman mimic the vertical strokes of the trees. Are they playing with the child, or is it like the story of King Solomon judging the two women who both claim the baby is theirs and declares that they must cut it in half? It could be a cheerful family playtime in the forest, but in the context of the darkness and timbre of the work, I think not. Jeu nudist, with a background of spikey trees in intense black and red, bears echoes of Gauguin and Doigâ€s work in the tropics, and of course Matisse in the circle of figures in motion, which here seem not so much to be dancing, as attempting to dance with some conflict, as young boys and older women tug and pull on each other. In Grandeur nature, a parade of pale figures with large shields and weapons look like a rag-tag group of children dressed as Roman soldiers or wearing masks who got lost or are up to some antics in the forest by the glow of a fading sunset. Épiphanie is an uplifting and enigmatic piece, a toile in charming purples and burnt violet-red tilted 90 degrees so a corner points to the floor and one the sky. It is without the element of the sinister that many of his works in this series have. The star-like drips and mist glow pleasantly, but not derivatively, conjure Doig again, and the circle of figures in the water and the full moon rising gives one a sense of magic and unity. The depths one can experience in the forest arenâ€t always dark, depraved and heavy, sometimes they are sublime.

It is important to be reminded that the ground we gain against censorship and for liberty must constantly be reinforced, fought for, and discussed. Is it valid that in a public place like the Salle André-Mathieu, the organizers of the exhibition caved to a public who demanded such works be removed, threatening to deny their future patronage? What does this imply besides a mess in terms of organization and communication? People who eagerly attend comedy performances where it is commonplace to seek laughs by raising the taboo and the offensive, can yet by offended by visual art depictions of light sexuality. Conversely, it is somehow comforting that the painted image is still that potent, that powerful still, in a culture where billboards, the internet, and magazines constantly inundate us with sexually-charged imagery. Our culture continues to be riddled with pettiness, prudery, and hypocrisy, and it is laudable for artists to hold up that mirror to their faces. The organizers of (co)motion apparently did not approve entirely of this exhibition, and it was mounted despite a few objections and the professionalism of Messierâ€s work, although it well fit the theme of the grotesque, humour and so on. It seems clear that the subject of the desired exhibition was meant to compliment the shows in the hall, but that this was not they had in mind. Sexuality is not funny to some, it is something to be ashamed of. It makes many uncomfortable, even when it is depicted with reference to art history and contemporary art, which most of the public would, of course, be largely unaware of. Does this denote an extensive lack of art education by the public? Why are some forms of entertainment permissible to tread on edgy ground while others are not? This conflict raised many interesting questions to the fore which are not easily answered. Ultimately, I believe this occurrence and consequent controversy was a benefit as it raises important questions and opens a discussion that will probably never be completely over. The progress we make in civil rights, freedom of expression, and sexual liberty are not permanently granted once gained, they are ground that must be guarded and maintained. This wonâ€t happen besides with education, but how much art education can the public be expected to obtain? Art, and especially a knowledgeable appreciation of art history and contemporary art are things one has to consciously seek out and work on. The public, en masse, generally has always had poor taste and only favours what is quite safe, conventional and pretty, what has long been established to be acceptable. Art that pushes the envelope is always necessary to stir up reactionary feelings, and that is exactly what Messier himself asserts that he intends to do: Cette ridicule étrangeté chercherait à produire chez nous le malaise dâ€un excès de pudeur face à des comportements naïfs et inassimilables pour des esprits lucides et freinés par la gène comme les nôtres.  It is my belief it was actually a good thing that this controversy occurred, as it pointed the ridiculousness of pervasive provincial attitudes and to the limitations of acceptance in our society and perhaps made many people think and feel, which is the goal of nearly every artist.

This is Lord of the Flies with adults, the wild undercurrent of humanity. Summer nights. Parties in the woods. Sacrifice. Ritual. Man as beast. The characters are dramatic and performative. Again, there is a distinct David Lynchian feel, the ordinary has turned menacing or horrific. There is a lot of shirt lifting, busty chest-exposing and grabbing, as if, with childlike glee, adults are discovering the pleasures of the human body again now that they are free in the forest. La forêt sâ€en vient II is a quite successful body of work in that it conveys a personal conception of reality, as well as an attunement to literature, contemporary culture and painting. This expressive, vivid yet mysterious style of painting well suits the subjects. As Marshal McLuhan said, the medium is the message. There is a distinct deepening and more interesting use of paint and subject since his last show at Galerie Laroche Joncas.  The themes are considerably more consistent. Messier is at his very best when he is responding to contemporary turns in painting as well as to the history of expressionist painting and is working in series with an ambiguous but narrative cohesion and with the natural energy and force that comes through in his work. This comes across less successfully in works that are more cartoony, solidly distinct, brightly-coloured and excessively dripping. They are quite gripping, lovely and intriguing when they seem to emanate from a field of energetic brushstrokes, from a haze of emotion and experience, when they emerge out of darkness and have a dynamic conversation with Peter Doig and Francis Bacon.

We are reminded by this episode of censorship that people like to confine their sexual experiences to the privacy of their own homes, or the like. They are discomfited when faced with their own appetites when they, presumably innocently, seek socially acceptable entertainment. They do not wish to encounter the absurdity and poignancy of their own bestial natures out of context, however depraved they may be in private. Not only as an exhibition of paintings but as a performance and a provocation—not as a senseless shock but rather the sort that stimulates thought—these works by Christian Messier are a success presaging interesting work for the future as well.

Daniel Barkleyâ€s latest exhibit at Galerie Dominique Bouffard is a celebration of the male form. The show consists of three bodies of work ranging in medium from acrylic on canvas or wood to watercolours, in a combination consisting of some studies as well as larger tableaux. Barkley is an artist who appreciates the immediacy of working in acrylic while painting like an oil painter, and his works are much more textural than one might expect from acrylic paintings. Their skillful rendering is an homage to the beauty of the male nude, while also being true to the modus operandi of many of the best portrait painters. Barkley revels in the authenticity of the individual while placing them, sometimes uncomfortably, in varied roles. Once you know that Barkley works in theatre with carpenters and other set painters, and that these are often the model base he typically draws on, appreciation for his work is further enriched. Barkley has an interest in medieval art, as well as images from the Soviet era which idolize the proud and manly worker. While each influence can be felt in his work, not one is overwhelming. You can feel the roots of Quebec in Barkleyâ€s paintings, from his upbringing as a Catholic to the socialist vein that runs through the province. Although these paintings are undeniably homoerotic in their adoration of the male nude, they are not exclusively so, and can be appreciated by any viewer who enjoys the male body, has a healthy love of myth or skillful portraiture. Undoubtedly, they can be admired for their virtuosic rendering as well as their mild humour and playfulness.

These works span a trinity of themes: exorcism, Lazarus and faune. A commonality through them all is the act of complicating the human figure with some kind of substance, from gold leaf to white paint to deer netting. At first I sought the symbolism in each, which can be found to be sure, but the more I looked at the skill of Barkleyâ€s work, the more it seemed he was trying to make painting the figure a greater challenge for himself, wondering what would be fun and difficult to paint. My guess is that for an artist like Barkley a true challenge is the most fun one can have in art. The palette of these works is his usual one, perhaps a little lighter, with the flesh rendered in cool tones of quinacridone red, cool blues and various pale tones, but never yellows, which the artist idiosyncratically asserts ruins every painting they occur in. There is a clear love of art history conveyed in Barkleyâ€s work, with particular fondness for Grünewald and Bosch. For recent correspondences, Lucien Freud, Jenny Saville and Odd Nerdrum were the first to come to my mind.

The eroticism of the male nude is not seen often after the predominance of Greek art in which the ever-human in character gods were portrayed in their unclothed perfection, nude bodies in gleaming marble or draped in cloth. Later, in a repressed fashion we encounter the male nude in the Christianity-dominated era, where Jesus and saints were tortured, spread, pierced and revered. There is a certain eroticism of the everyday in the types of men and youths that Barkley chooses, as well as a tender rendering in the loving brushwork which cuts in at subtle and finely observed angles, from the eye which so keenly sees and the hand which is so in tune with it.

Lines, scratches and a multitude of unexpected marks free the viewer largely from the relentlessness of Barkley’s skillful representation. His works are very much about drawing and process, as well as precision of colour, line and form. This can be seen from the fact that this exhibition is largely bolstered by studies and watercolours, which, from many artists, would serve as finished works. He is also known to be a masterful draughtsman, and a book of his drawings was recently published. Barkley is a formal artist, but one unusually connected to myth, which is less common in contemporary art than one might think.

Lazarus

Daniel Barkley has long been intrigued by the biblical story of Lazarus, which he conveys here as the nude male covered in a white liquid substance, which is partly dried to the face at times. Since Lazarus was raised from the dead by Jesus, I thought of the white lye poured on dead bodies, although in art history he is usually portrayed as rising from the tomb wrapped in strips of white linen.  The white material covering these figures brings to mind milk and purity, according to the artist. Paradoxically, there are many associations the white substance conjures up in a viewer, which manage to be an engaging combination of transcendent and erotic, even dirty, as they could also be thought to have been thoroughly baptized in come. 

The Lazarus nudes are tumescent, half-erect, about to rise like their namesake from the death of sleep. Their eyes are closed, and some seem to be struggling to stretch and move their bodies once more. The oil on wood triptych, entitled Lazarus (Triptyque / Triptych) is presented as if for worship in a religious format, portraying a tense figure in the middle panel, shoulders raised to his ears, perhaps condensing his form to pass through a birth canal. The figures on either side of him gesture with their hands as if opening their chests, their hearts. The blue background is the colour of spirit, of sky right before the depth of night, and red lines and scratches are dug through, which could stand for vitality or for life’s visceral hardness which intersects with the divine experience.

One of the most striking works is Big White Face, drooling, provocative, with profound visual depth, as the man closes his wet white-lashed eyes with his mouth wide open. The watercolour Lazarus paintings are done dry, and Barkleyâ€s technique is to only moisten his paper for the initial stretching. The boys lie upon black rectangles like coffins, tense, as if reawakening or contracting in orgasmic bliss. Perhaps birth is just such an experience. These models were covered in paint, and, of course, painted with paint, so essentially it is an artistâ€s comment; paint is all that clothes them much as flesh clothes the spirit and paint adorns the canvas.  Every moment of our existence consists of layers of revealing and concealing.

Faune

Daniel Barkleyâ€s lovely fauns are young men with heavy leather belts holding together skirts of deer netting as if they are black mesh tutus. These paintings are playful and reminiscent of actors in an amateur production of Midsummer Nightâ€s Dream. These Pucks are a little ungainly, as if theyâ€re still growing into their bodies and their masculinity, captured fauns in deer netting unsure of their sexuality and identity. The netting is rendered meticulously, yet with a certain looseness. The rough, manly hands and feet seem to reveal a certain work ethic, perhaps they are the carpenters or stage hands Barkley works with, since they donâ€t look like actors or dancers. They are mawkish as they attempt to hold a ballet first position, they seem to be playing a role, and are in various states of comfort or discomfort with it, reminiscent of all of us in the varied roles we play.

Many of the canvases in the Faune series are broken into multiple, different-sized panels to form diptychs, again echoing religious iconography, yet they represent the “forbidden”, they convey homoerotic desire. They also recall those days on the stage when boys played women. Particularly lovely is Faune with Green Toenails (Dipytch), who stares at us intensely as he reveals himself, and poses, of course, with lime green toenails. These fauns are tamed creatures, posing, submitting, but a little wild, a little uncomfortable, and they provoke us while making us uncomfortable about our gaze. One of the larger works of this series, and to my mind the most successful, is Faune- Personnage Secondaire, who is the only young man bearing horns. His feet are painted black, but only on the top front portion, as if they are meant to loosely convey the idea of hooves in an amateur theatrical. In anointing the feet of this young man in black paint and giving him hooves it is doubly heathen, since it also brings associations of Mary Magdalene anointing the feet of Jesus. Again, there is a bit of irreverence, more than hinting at homoerotic expression in a typically religious format of diptych and triptych, a format meant to fold up and be revealed for intimate worship. There is an awkward, moving humanity, a vulnerability to the masculine in these boys. Faune 9 is in a lovely pose, arms above his head, relaxed and saucy, seemingly more confident in his nudity and attire than the others. The thick brown leather belts which hold the black netting in place resemble what a monk might wear over his habit.

Exorcism

This exhibition contains two large exorcism paintings and several small painted studies. The exorcism paintings show one young man expelling his double through his mouth and the toes of the “demonic” figure appear to be stuffed in the mouth of the one who was possessed.  The dynamic movements of the twisting, escaping figures are very effective in their naturalism even though they are propelled through the air. The use of emotion particularly in the body language of the possessed ones are very convincing and engaging. The possessed figure contorts and contracts, seemingly in pain or shock.

The use of gold leaf in the Lazarus paintings—rendered expertly in paint, not applied to the canvas—is due to Barkleyâ€s interest in medieval art, as is the theme of these works. A popular medieval subject is a demon being purged from the body of a person through the mouth, with the foot of the creature still in contact. In Barkleyâ€s paintings, the painted gold leaf flies through the air as the expelled body undulates through the atmosphere, born out of himself. Against gritty industrial backgrounds, the nude men stand in water upset by ripples, and paired with an image of exorcism, baptism comes to mind. Symbolically, water can convey emotion in dream realms, a conductive sphere of influence where the fluidity of state change is imminent and everything is connected.

Barkley likens these images to Ouroboros, the snake who eats his own tail. If the man is possessed by himself, what is he exorcising? His erotic desires? His doppelgänger? Is he in a constant process of purging layers of self? Again, we come back to musing on actors, with the world as a stage, and the many-layered personae we bear within ourselves. The erotic is also present, the orifice filled with a lowly foot, the contorted bodies, the mirrored image in homoerotic desires which could, symbolically, point to a yearning to connect to, and penetrate, the higher self. There are phallic interpretations to one devouring oneâ€s own tail, as well as self-sufficiency implied in such wholeness. One also can think of Narcissus and his mirror image. Are these characters exorcising an image of themselves, an addiction to narcissism? As in all good art, we arenâ€t provided with obvious answers, only potential ones and a plethora of questions.

Daniel Barkley is an artist with a certain insistence on physical reality even when he is expressing moments of magic. I asked him why only the foot was coming out of the mouth, why not just a hand emerging or why didnâ€t the mouth of the possessed one is open like a snake. Barkley rather recoiled from the idea, saying it would be weird, the image of some other artist. Although his works are imaginative, there is a certain formalism, the portraitistâ€s respect for natureâ€s proportions and limitations. A bit out of left field from the other exorcism paintings is Hermes, a close-up acrylic painting of a very well-kempt pair of feet decorated loosely in gold leaf, with a vague impression of wings around the ankles. These are the feet of Hermes or Mercury, god fleet of foot, god of transitions and boundaries who moves freely between worlds.  Exorcism 2 shows a tension in gripped hands, a contraction of the stomach, as if a birth through the mouth, expelling of breath/life. The surprise on the boyâ€s face and pose in Étude pour exorcism 1 I find freer than the larger exorcism paintings, and there is an engaging, slightly wicked expression in the face of the boy expelled. In Étude pour exorcism 3, the escaping one sleepily clutches himself like a newborn baby, which returns us to the rebirth theme introduced in the Lazarus paintings.

There is a power and a sense of drama to the large works in this exhibition–particularly the Exorcism paintings–which is counterbalanced by an intimacy and freedom of gesture in the studies. Barkley paints nudes because they are timeless and don’t indicate class. There is a purity and sanctity to these nudes, as well as a high degree of honesty. Even though the paintings are allegorical, they seem very specific, more within the realms of portraiture and not of archetype, which is where they differ from classical art or Renaissance painting. It appears to me that the artist perceives the erotic and the holy in the everyday man, and thus paints them democratically and with worshipful rigor, glorifying his models as imperfect gods. Daniel Barkleyâ€s latest works are irreverent in that Québécois way where the worst curse words are ecclesiastical in origin. However, these paintings are also oddly reverent in their own, more secular way, where the body is a holy temple and art is the highest way to ponder human existence through form, the transcendental place where body and mind meet, on the canvas.