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2 of 2
Gallery is pleased to
announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Vancouver based
artist Steven Hubert. Beginning with a reclining nude in portrait format behind a tree-screen still life of flowers, the twenty-one paintings of This and Then This and Then This But Not This map out a causal chain of hunches based on Hubert’s ongoing interest in the structuring of form and idea. Rather than striking out against tradition, these paintings take for granted a ground zero made up of waterfalls, bridges, paths, bushes, figures, and even abstraction itself—the raw ingredients for a clandestine reconstruction over top of debris that has never been properly cleaned up. “The small portrait-oriented canvases, each painted in a day for the exhibition This And Then This And Then This But Not This Or This begin with a ground zero (en francais?) Ingres-inspired recli ning nude behind a floral still life and move through landscape, pattern, color, shape, painting-as-window motif, curtain and smoke as ‘cone’ motif, portrait as arte povera experiment, expressive reconsideration, decorative question, stylization, collage, bocconcini sandwich-like, material-as-subject, artist searching for a suitable subject, towards abstraction, towards trompe l’oeil, towards a lie, towards truth, away from irony, towards sincerity, towards a heightened irony and then back again, towards unmitigated failure possibility” Portugal Espanol. In his paintings Hubert is specifically interested in the relationship of the abstract to the superimposed modes of representation—(language is an analogy of this). In looking at how things become abstracted—in tracing relationships backwards from real things to reveal possible origins and vice versa—he tries to revel in the structures or habits of thought that confound the original idea through the very act of representation. The end result could be revelatory, but more often it is absurd. It may also be just the beginning. Some of Hubert’s devices—the cone of activity, the sweaters, the flashlight—all double as both thing and abstraction, but fail in some regard to articulate a clear distinction. Recreational activity fills the middle-ground between genuine action affecting the real world and waxing philosophically about it. This journey from the real to the abstract and back again is also seen here as a conversation between content and form—a dialogue which he believes is covered by a surface that must first be appealed to, for pragmatic reasons, as the true site of intrinsic value, because surface reveals everything and nothing about what is at the center. Painting is one such surface. Steven Hubert is a Vancouver-based artist who graduated from Emily Carr Institute in 2007. Bearing the imprint of previous study in English literature, his work in painting, sculpture, drawing and video takes cues from poetics (in a certain sense) with a backsplash of history that is partly logical, partly mystical, and perforated by alternating bouts of the simple and the complex. It is often absurdly expansionistic and lacks clarity due to its chronic and programmatic mistaking of one idea for another. He has exhibited in Vancouver at CSA Space, Or Gallery, Helen Pitt Gallery, Emergency Room Strathcona, as well as Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax) and Ministry of Casual Living (Victoria). His work has appeared in Pyramid Power and The Fillip Review. For more information about Steven Hubert or the gallery, please visit our website HYPERLINK "http://www.2of2gallery.com" www.2of2gallery.com or contact the gallery at HYPERLINK "mailto:info@2of2gallery.com" info@2of2gallery.com 254 Niagara St. (Toronto, Canada) or 416-591-6464. |
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2 of 2 Gallery | 254 Niagara Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M6J
2L8 | 416-591-6464 | info@2of2gallery.com
| www.2of2gallery.com