{"id":35531,"date":"2016-09-13T12:55:55","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T16:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artoronto.ca\/?p=35531"},"modified":"2016-10-03T13:19:07","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T17:19:07","slug":"roald-nasgaard-ric-evans-at-metivier-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/?p=35531","title":{"rendered":"Roald Nasgaard: Ric Evans at Nicholas Metivier Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abstract painting is alive and well, and Ric Evans is in top form. His new paintings are youthfully bold \u2013 or is it old-masterly confident? \u2013 tightly bound geometric compositions with quirky colours, contrasting paint surfaces and unstable locations. These are the larger rectangular paintings. Then there are the smaller diptychs and triptychs, whose external shapes are more idiosyncratic. At first sight it takes more than a moment to realize that the panels in each set are indeed identical. Their unpredictable internal subdivisions and their eccentric colours cast even that certainty in continual doubt. Instability is the constant state of Ric\u2019s paintings. They are compositionally whole, but the eye can\u2019t hold them still. Encounter<\/em>, with its mustard-coloured ground against which three sturdy rectilinear planes churn around a center core like the arms of some big industrial mixing machine. An angular, glistening, copper shape in the bottom left pushes up at a luminous cobalt blue rectangle above, which in turn must weigh down on a dark purple, irregular rhomboid on the right, which then shoves\u00a0along the original copper shape. So it goes, round and round \u2013 working both clockwise and counter-clockwise \u2013 in a concatenation of muscular actions that fire up our own internal mirror neurons, inundating our bodies with emphatic emotional responses.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ric Evans, Encounter, 2016, acrylic on canvas on board, 68″ x 68″. Courtesy of \u00a0Nicholas Metivier Gallery<\/p>\n

If geometry implies measure and system, while colour stokes the sensual and the intuitive,\u00a0what is Ric\u2019s system? A decade or so ago his rules were more upfront, but in this exhibition,\u00a0his workings are freer, more instinctual and improvised. Ric is a consummate colourist, he\u00a0declares his colours individually, each independently holding its own. When he juxtaposes\u00a0them, adjacent colours learn provisionally to co-exist, but not without border tensions. As\u00a0important to these paintings is their material body. Paint is variously applied, smooth or\u00a0brushed onto solid supports, the larger canvases stretched over wood panels. To make the\u00a0smaller diptychs and triptychs, Ric has applied his paint with a palette knife in some cases,\u00a0directly onto birch panels.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ric Evans, Changing Location, 2016, set of 3, oil on panel, 21″ x 19″ each.\u00a0Courtesy of \u00a0Nicholas Metivier Gallery<\/span><\/p>\n

Ric\u2019s work emerged in the mid-1970s, when painting faced two important challenges, one from\u00a0outside the discipline and another from inside it. This was when the serious art world was\u00a0turning hostile to painting altogether, and when its future was not altogether certain. Painting\u00a0had come to pose a number of problems. From a post-modern perspective, modernist painting\u2019s claims to timelessness and universality were bankrupt because, as we now learned,\u00a0all artistic utterances were merely contingent outcomes of specific temporal social and\u00a0political conditions. Geometric abstraction was doubly suspect because its underlying\u00a0geometric structures were concomitantly revealed \u2013 whatever a Mondrian or a Newman may\u00a0have believed \u2013 to signify neither utopian nor transcendental values, but were rather abstract\u00a0codifications of oppressive political or bureaucratic systems of power. In any case, with the\u00a0availability of a range of new technologies, painting\u2019s craft-based practice had apparently\u00a0outlived its usefulness.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ric Evans, Still Form,\u00a02016, acrylic on canvas on board, 40″ x 30″. Courtesy of \u00a0Nicholas Metivier Gallery<\/p>\n

Painting, of course, survived and proved to be indispensable to art\u2019s toolbox, but not without a\u00a0changed sense of itself. Ric also came into his own in a climate of Minimalist art in which\u00a0painting sought to forefront its status as a material object. This was in the mid-1960s and into\u00a0the 1970s, when stretchers thickened and frames disappeared. Eugene Goosens, in his text for\u00a0the MoMA exhibition, The Art of the Real<\/em> in 1967, described how each work in the show was\u00a0literally \u2018real\u2019 because it offered \u201citself for whatever its uniqueness is worth in the form of a\u00a0simple irrefutable object.\u201d In this situation one found oneself physically on equal footing with\u00a0the painting, co-existing with it in a shared space, another independent piece of reality with a\u00a0certain height, width, depth, colour and texture.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ric Evans, The Flow of Surprise (Double Green, Magenta and Yellow), 2016, set of 3, oil on panel, 37 1\/2″ x 23″.\u00a0Courtesy of \u00a0Nicholas Metivier Gallery<\/p>\n

Thus when Ric made his museum debut in 1975 in an Art Gallery of Ontario group show\u00a0simply entitled Four Painters<\/em>, and was asked by the curator to describe his work for the\u00a0catalogue, he simply gave the facts: \u201cRic Evans paints 6 in. vertical bands of artist\u2019s oil colour\u00a0on a ground of latex interior house paints, on canvases 3 ft. by 6 ft.\u201d Along with his colleagues\u00a0in the exhibition, he defined the \u201cmost obviously common aspects\u201d of their work as \u201creduced\u00a0means, serial format, denial of illusion and illustration.\u201d<\/p>\n

The particularity of Ric\u2019s paintings has been how he constructs, using coloured and textured\u00a0shapes, a succession of relationships that are always in tension. We can seize them only\u00a0piecemeal, and then strive to put them wholly together. The experience of painting has never\u00a0been a passive one, as its distractors have claimed, but Ric\u2019s painting thrives on immersing its\u00a0viewers in experiences of change, dislocation and decenteredness. Their world remains in flux,\u00a0imagined orders emerging, dissolving and remerging.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ric Evans, Appearances of Certainty, 2016, acrylic and oil on canvas on board, 60″ x 60″.\u00a0Courtesy of \u00a0Nicholas Metivier Gallery<\/p>\n

If there is existential meaningfulness to staging perceptual performances of mutating\u00a0instability as if they were surrogates for the vagaries of everyday human experience, in Ric\u2019s\u00a0work it presupposes neither despair nor melancholy. It is on the contrary both exciting and\u00a0celebratory. As I have said before, in Abstract Painting in Canada<\/em>: \u201cUp-front, quirkily so, as\u00a0Evans\u2019 compositional structures often are, it is nevertheless when he pits structure against\u00a0destabilizing contraries that his more recent painting delivers its aesthetic pizzazz.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roald Nasgaard<\/p>\n

*Note: The article was originally written for Nicholas Metivier Gallery and published on its website. We thank the gallery for their permission of posting it in artoronto.ca.<\/p>\n

**Exhibition information: September 8 – 24, 2016,\u00a0\u00a0Nicholas Metivier Gallery, 451 King Street West, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tue \u2013 Sat, 10 am \u2013 6 pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Roald Nasgaard<\/strong><\/p>\n

Up-front, quirkily so, as Evans\u2019 compositional structures often are, it is nevertheless when he pits structure against destabilizing contraries that his more recent painting delivers its aesthetic pizzazz<\/p>\n

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