BY ELIZABETH NOLAN
Special to the Driftwood
Mature artists with known bodies of work don’t always find it easy to travel in new directions. Having a recognizable style can become a kind of trap — especially if that style is attached to a successful outcome, whether critical or commercial.
Salt Spring couple Deon and Kathy Venter have known both types of success in their individual artistic careers, boasting international collectors and feature exhibits at important institutions — such as Kathy’s series of sculptures that travelled from Toronto’s Gardiner Museum to locations in the U.S. and South Africa before ending up at the 2014-2015 Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale. Deon’s paintings can likewise be found in the permanent collections of museums, national galleries and notable public and private collections across three continents.
Despite these successes, neither artist has ever seemed hesitant to try new lines of inquiry or methods. Their current joint show at Gallery 8 highlights their remarkable capacity for engaging new ways of understanding the world and human experience.
Lifestyle changes for Deon in the past year have influenced his new Chrysalis paintings. Known for producing large-scale works in thick oil paint, the artist has retained a lot of his expressive, visceral texture while adding underlying nuance and mystery. The setting for the series In the Garden is the ancient old-growth groves of coastal B.C., with scenes of huge trees often dwarfing a tiny human figure.
Deon starts his canvases with colourful compositions that capture the energy, life force and surprisingly broad palette of the rainforest, first with a thin oil wash and then with added layers of impasto. But his next step is to cover the compositions entirely with a thicker layer of titanium white. He then recreates and simultaneously reveals the underlying sketch by moving his fingers through the white layer. The scene below is glimpsed in the grooves left behind, and mixture between the layers adds depth and contrast. It’s an energetic and playful approach that Deon says is kind of like jazz.
“There’s a certain excitement, like opening a present,” he said. “And all of a sudden, it reveals itself.”
The method of revelation is somewhat mystical and therefore well aligned with the theme of these works; Deon experiences the ancient forest in a deeply spiritual way. In the Garden refers both to the coastal refuges, as well as figures from major world religions finding their spiritual path while alone in the wild: Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the Buddha’s lonesome meditations and Mohammed with his mountain. Deon’s view of such religions recognizes the human need to make sense of the world through narrative, and for him the spiritual nature of old-growth forests exists alongside these narratives rather than above or outside of them.
He proves his universal religious tolerance in other paintings, where the grooves in the white layer variously reveal a seated Buddha, mountain peaks and a human handprint placed on a door in Morocco. The underlying colours are bright and energetic, appearing at times almost like neon tubes against the white field.
Kathy Venter’s part of the show, Echo/Reflection/Entrance, began with a new realization that an echo could describe any event or an idea.
“It’s not restricted to sound. It’s anything you say or think or move,” she explained. “So when I realized that, I thought, I’m going to put this into sculpture. It’s not an easy thing to do because it’s abstract, but there’s nothing that’s as fascinating as putting something abstract into three dimensions.”
An important aspect of the echo is that what returns is not an exact copy, but inevitably distorts and degrades the original output. The Echo concept is exemplified in a sculpture comprising three nude female figures standing in a row. The central figure is intact, but the two to either side of her are missing their arms, facial figures and other bits — and each of these echoing figures is itself different than the other. Coated in a very thick glaze that resembles tarnished bronze, the sculpture speaks to the relationship between antiquity and modernity, and the way that one moment can influence past and future without ever being replicable.
Kathy explores this idea further, and specifically the weight of art history on her own artistic journey, in another one of the Echo series. Recollection features two female nudes standing back to back, one in a reddish matte glaze portraying ideal classical beauty. Behind her, a rough figure in blue slumps against the beauty’s back. Missing its head and all limbs but one leg, this is the echo at its most distorted return.
Moving forward from the idea of echo, Kathy has depicted the abstract idea of Entrance through incomplete figures that are balanced in fragments of small watercraft, and has produced some technically challenging and beautifully rendered works on Reflection. In River Silver, a figure lounges above its doubled and conjoined shape as if reflected below the waterline. The perfectly balanced form looks so natural, it obscures how truly difficult this was to achieve in clay. The speckled grey glaze aptly suggests river stone.
The opportunity to view this high-calibre show should not be missed. The exhibit at Gallery 8 continues through Oct. 20.