Untitled #764, by Douglas Walker (2005)
The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto is currently tiled over entirely in Delft blue, which is somewhat fitting, at least in terms of decor. The Barnicke Gallery is nestled at the end of a long corridor in the austere setting of the university’s Hart House. Every time I visit, I’m struck by the strangeness of the space, by the fact that the gallery is in a perpetual wrestling match with its architecture: how the stone and low-ceilings of the gothic-revival building sit so uneasily with the spatial exigencies of a contemporary art gallery.
Douglas Walker’s new show, Other Worlds, is one of the few I’ve seen at the Barnicke Gallery that benefits from the stern impositions of Hart House’s architecture. Walker has been obsessed, for quite some time now, with Delft blue, and with this strange painting method he has concocted for himself, which both mimics and pays homage to Dutch ceramics.
His paintings are always on slick surfaces, and always blue and white. The paint slips and streaks and Walker has become adept at choreographing the smudges of his brush marks to impersonate textures and shapes: little droplets become the tiny leaves of willow trees, buttery whorls become glass beads or balls, wispy brush strokes become feather filaments.
He has also invented some kind of crackle technique. Any vast field of paint is shot through with ersatz fissures, little spidery veins that throw a kind of antique drag over his work, as if these images are made on worn ceramics handed down through long centuries.
The result is always a kind of temporal dislocation, paintings that don’t sit easily in either present or past: the subject matter — florid patterns, fantastical architecture, and the odd figure (usually a porcelain-doll woman with a towering headpiece) — is not rooted in the contemporary, but neither is it strictly historical. In the same way that the Middle Earth of Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones‘ Westeros or any fantasy setting is an atmospheric riff on an historical period or architecture, Walker’s paintings are less referential than they are redolent.
For his show at the Barnicke Gallery, Walker has covered every available wall space in a tile pattern, a massive installation. Huge white-on-blue images splay across the walls: an enormous whale, a crashing wave, the moon, a mask-like face, a bridge that stretches across three walls, and every so often, a small decorative pattern. The look of his imagery has become much rougher. He makes heavy use of this paint-crackle technique, and so there is not one uninterrupted line in the whole show. Swaths of paint detach themselves from one another, forming small, rough islands of white, scored by rivulets of blue; lines stutter across the visual field in a kind of coarse Morse-code pattern.
What one makes of all this depends on one’s patience for these kinds of material games. To my mind, the best that can be said of the installation is that it has a theatrical verve, like a vast stage set. The small square-foot pieces of paper are treated convincingly enough that they maintain the illusion of porcelain, even from a fairly close distance. But once that feat of impersonation has been registered, there’s not much else there to hold on to. The heavy dependence on this crackle technique to depict anything and everything makes for an exasperating visual monotony, and its constant reiteration only reinforces its tricksiness. There’s a wide array of subject matter in this installation — people, animals, natural phenomena, planets, architecture — and everything is treated in the exact same way. Organic, inorganic, solid, liquid, flora, fauna: everything is translated into the language of crackle. The heavy texture of the fissures and cracks flattens and deadens the images, especially as it’s being used so unrelentingly. Formally speaking, Other Worlds is like a heavy-handed special-effects blockbuster: there’s so much flying in your face that it all just washes out into a kind of busy din.
Peter Dykhuis and Corinna Ghaznavi’s curatorial statement waxes rhapsodic about the content of the images: their ethereality, their other-worldliness. I was not so transported, and in the end, beyond the material mimicry and the textural bombast, I was left wondering what all this imagery is in aid of. This is a question that haunts Walker’s images: what do they say? There’s a loose system of references at play; the invocation of Dutch ceramics sets off an associative chain: colonialism, 19th century aestheticism and its orientalist obsessions with chinoiserie. The only thing that comes at all close to exploring that set of associations is the wall-sized wave, which pays clear homage to Hokusai. But that’s where the visual investigation stops, and that’s where all of Walker’s work seems to stop: at the image. Ultimately, a ceramic vase is an all-too appropriate metaphor for Walker’s practice: a slick, seductive surface that adorns an empty vessel.
Other Worlds continues at the Barnicke Gallery until August 18.
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Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
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