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front cover metamorphosis oil on canvas 42 x 68 in 107 x 173 cm opposite recollection detail[close]
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198 davenport road toronto on m5r 1j2 canada 416.962.0438 800.551.2465 info@odonwagnergallery.com www.odonwagnergallery.com[close]
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towards an archeology of colour like most paintings of consequence the non-representational paintings of gideon tomaschoff benefit from careful examination which is to say it is important to look at them up close it is misleading to some degree to talk about the paintings as non-representational for while they offer no ostensible readily discernable subject some object or action drawn from the outside world an orange a vase gideon tomaschoff at his studio a cow a battle-scene they are representational in the sense that they represent as in re-present the essential qualities that make painting happen light first and foremost light and coloured light hue value emptiness and plenitude texture and its opposite the strategic removal of texture by this last i mean to remind the viewer that tomaschoff does a lot of wiping scraping sanding and general distressing of his surfaces and his pigments so that each painting inevitably becomes a painting by virtue of its being in essence the survivor of the painting process because tomaschoff prefers on the whole to paint with his hands wielding rags and such in addition to brushes his paintings tend to eschew the act of drawing as we have come to think of it instead they billow towards the miasmic the informe towards the presentation of pulsing luxuriously dispersed clouds of colour the establishment of fields of colour as ends in themselves rather than functioning as stages upon which disport figures and notations placed there by the usual deliberations of drawing but while there is little or no drawing in tomaschoff s paintings there is an abundance of structure the kind of structure that is made either to defer to the primacy of colour or contrariwise is made to support colour so that it might flourish as content in itself in paintings such as the crepuscular endlessly outspread the molten grasping distance and the brightly burning shenanigans for example there is evidence in all three works of a clearly disclosed spatial organization at work an almost quadrant-like horizontal/vertical scaffolding in endlessly outspread and shenanigans and an insistent horizon-like horizontality in grasping distance and if you look attentively you will see that pretty much all of the paintings are put together in this general way this overall structuring which informs tomaschoff s paintings almost as fundamentally as the pictures stretchers do has a central purpose to provide the artist with a proscribed arena in which the structuring now in place he can concentrate on the real business at hand the making of the painting per se for with tomaschoff whose paintings live and breathe colour at the heart of their being his struggle with pigment is the struggle with the painting s progress into being you will notice that there is scarcely a moment anywhere in any of tomaschoff s paintings where you can locate a passage of unmediated pigment while most painters pile[close]
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the pigment on tomaschoff having applied abundant colour to his canvases proceeds to distress his surfaces in such prolonged and ornate ways that his residual surfaces are now frayed rubbed blotted stretched and all in all made dizzyingly complex especially if as i recommended earlier you move up and examine them closely it s almost like looking at an ordinarily banal substance through a microscope inspect as by fire for example and you will find a hundred reds not just five or six look at felt no wind and you ll see a whole panoply of blues mauves indigos maroons purples a dark mosaic of twilit atmospheres pulling forward the lighter colours and pushing back the darks in sounds of life there is an almost infinite variety of burnished yellow-golds while the mysterious almost sub-aqueous sweet intrusion opens onto a sweetly veiled essentially undersea exploration into unknowable vistas of blue-green all held in place by the artist s dependable if softly disposed employment of his chosen structural barricades the gentle but firmly felt assertions of his horizontals and verticals it might be useful to bring up at this point the degree to which tomaschoff s paintings appear both to suggest and welcome interpretation to encourage something of a naturalistic reading it is sometimes unavoidable that certain passages of sumptuous but distressed pigment will suggest the sort of imagery that is harvested from the worlds of our normal experience it is pretty difficult almost to the point of perversity to try not to see for example a red sun at the upper left of sounds of life and maybe a distant green shore too and who can honestly admit to ignoring the obvious sky-over-sea quiescence of verges of illusion this reading is made almost inevitable by tomaschoff s use of horizontal stroking for the brimming ocean part of the painting the lower half and vertical stroking for the vaulting sky section lifting over the sea in the upper half indeed a number of his most successful paintings non-representational or not seem almost to assume this horizontal sea-sky or landsky division in the handsome recollection a dazzlingly beautiful multi-hued sky floats over a lowering nocturnal sea similarly in peacefully spread there is airy lightness positioned over heavy darkness who can resist such claims of landscape i asked tomaschoff during a studio visit about this détente of his between abstraction and imagery i asked him if the viewer s inescapable finding of imagery in otherwise imagefree paintings disturbed him a few days later he sent me an email i hope you don t mind he wrote that i took it as a compliment when looking at one painting in particular you suddenly saw things you didn t notice in your first viewing he went on to say that it has been one of his unstated aims that the imperatives of imagery should serve first to surprise himself and then come gradually to other viewers seeing surprises suggestions even small hints however subtle they may be emerging from the canvas i believe he continued that they all have to be there for art to be successful gary michael dault[close]
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grasping distance oil on canvas 36 x 38 in 91 x 97 cm inscribed oil on canvas 36 x 38 in 91 x 97 cm[close]
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