PLATO

Participating artists: Peter Hong Tsun Chan, Kevin Christy, Hugh Clemons, Maude Corriveau, Ákos Ezer, Beau Gabriel, Zhexing Huang, Adam Lupton, Katya Muromtseva, Tommaso Nicolao, Charlie Roberts, Adam Parker Smith, Alex Sutcliffe, Miko Veldkamp and Jesse Zuo.

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Plato is excited to present Legacy, a group exhibition comprising artworks by 15 painters and sculptors, opening with a public reception on November 26, 6-8pm. The works in Legacy, pointing to a wide range of art historical figures and movements – from Neo-Classicism to Surrealism, and from the Baroque to the Nabis – demonstrate that art history is well and alive in the eyes of contemporary creators.

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For some, it is a way to transcend the everyday, like in Maude Corriveau’s dreamlike still-life and in Kevin Christy’s enigmatic self-portrait as a fireplace in the style of René Magritte. For others, it is a touchstone allowing them to process reality through the prism of a spiritually purer by-gone era. It is the case, for instance, in Beau Gabriel’s female portrait inspired by his residency in Siena, which evokes early Renaissance icons. 

 

For yet others, art history is a beast from the past that can be harnessed to confront reality. In his self-portrait I Couldn’t Say It, Chinese artist Zhexing Huang formally follows the tradition of Classical European sculpture, with Auguste Rodin and Charles Ray being some most recent antecedents. Yet, Huang’s decision to produce it in shiny black plastic and resin, and to render his own likeness in a dress and ballet shoes, signals a defiant stance against gender-normative art history. It is also a statement against the censorship of personal expression that the artist experienced growing up. According to Huang, “silence can be powerful, and vulnerability can be a potent force against gender expectations, collective values, capitalist systems, and Euro traditions.” 

 

American sculptor Adam Parker Smith’s hyperrealistic pool float is a riff on both S-curved classical marbles and Jeff Koons’ faux rubber sculptures, providing a wry commentary on the glorification of leisure in a country with rather modest vacation policies. Leisurely activities of a less innocuous nature are the subject of Peter Hong Tsun Chan’s Still Life with Bread and Wine, a painting infused with memories and nostalgia. Chan, who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong as a child, packs his admitted homage to the pioneers of Dutch still-life Floris van Dijck and Clara Peeter with culturally loaded signifiers: red wine, a symbol of Christianity; Hong Kong bread staples favored by the diaspora abroad; a film poster with mahjong game and horse racing as its subjects; lottery tickets from the Hong Kong Jockey Club and from Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. 

 

Nostalgia finds an entirely different expression in the works by the Surinamese artist Miko Veldkamp who grew up in the Netherlands and is currently living in New York. He uses the Post-Impressionist aesthetics similar to the Nabis movement and compositions reminiscent of Édouard Manet to evoke the poetry, ambiguity and longing often accompanying lives in between cultures. Manet is also referenced in Katya Muromtseva’s watercolor. Its sitter, a female immigrant, takes a pose similar to that of the nude in the company of two fully clothed men in Manet’s Breakfast on the Grass. The chosen pose, imprinted in the collective subconscious due to the notoriety of Manet’s masterpiece, possibly suggests female vulnerability and the universality of the plight of displacement.

 

The paintings of Hungarian artist Ákos Ezer elevate European hipsters to mythical proportions of historical and mythological figures in Baroque art. Ezer satirizes his characters’ strive for cool sartorial choices, social relevance and consumerist abundance. The nature of material desire is also probed in the work of Italian-American Tommaso Nicolao, who, as an experienced art director, is familiar with the mechanisms behind its creation. In his grand manner paintings, an I-Phone charger and red Ikea sheets placed on marble slabs become stand-ins for what used to be heroes and aristocrats in Neoclassical academic painting. 

 

American Charlie Roberts, now based in Sweden and heavily influenced by the European old masters, fuses human hunger for food and corporeal pleasure the same way Johannes Vermeer and Frans Hals did in their depictions of lustful feasts and romantic encounters over a shared meal. Alex Sutcliffe’s main focus has been on images of courtship and desire as portrayed by the old masters. His recent paintings elucidate that these subjects still hold a sensual sway over the viewer, even after rounds of deliberate digital and painterly obfuscation.

 

New York-based Chinese painter Jesse Zuo also employs concealment, in her case as a technique to hide the identity of her sitter, while suggestively revealing her legs, framed by the classical drapery of the blanket. Subjecting her own body to the proverbial gaze, Zuo only reveals a part of it, frustrating the viewer used to full-body old-master portraiture.

 

In the painting entitled Surface Tension, Canadian painter Adam Lupton reinterprets the gaze of oneself via the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection after seeing it in a pool of water. Breaking with the traditional conventions of how this scene has been represented over the centuries, Lupton focuses on the radiating ripples produced by an object thrown in the water. Their concentric circles with a hole in the middle superimposed on the reflection of the subject’s stomach bear a striking resemblance to the effect of a gunshot. Englishman Hugh Clemons also conjures a dream-like atmosphere in which he portrays himself in the moment of destruction: he is about to smash a canvas against the floor of a gloomy apartment. Clemons admitted that his painting is partially inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film The Shining, in which Jack Nicholson’s character succumbs to the demons of the past.

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Is the destruction of the self in the old master guise a true rebellion against the centuries-old forms, a vigorous attempt to counter the often stale ideas associated with them? Or is it just a dream that allows for a wish fulfillment, a game one plays without really having to give up the familiar means of expression? Even if it is a game, it might allow one to tackle old challenges, demons… and masters – in a novel way, and thus for a possibility of redemption. As the most famous line from The Shining goes: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”