FUNK X 2
Robert Holland Murray, Sculpture and Oscar Varese, Paintings (vitrines)

January 15 – February 25

Funk was the title of a 1967 exhibition organized by Peter Selz of oddball California sculpture that resisted the mainstream formalism of the time. Beyond this esoteric art world reference, Funk is a term associated with music, from dirty New Orleans jazz to the hard syncopations of James Brown, the Meters, Sly Stone and electric Miles Davis. I had both of these references in mind when putting these two Montreal artists together. Robert Murray particularly has a deep-rooted connection to jazz and rhythm and blues that dates back to his native Detroit, where he once worked for Motown Records.

This show is respectfully dedicated to James Brown (May 3, 1933 - Dec. 25, 2006).

ROBERT HOLLAND MURRAY

In one of Romare Bearden’s best known collages, SHE-BA (1970), the conjurer holds in one of her hands a ceremonial staff that echoes the gesture of her other free hand. It is as though the hand and the staff are in dialogue, the animate and the inanimate summoning energies from one another. The power of inanimate form and of hand touching and shaping wood is nowhere more arresting than in African carving, which Robert Holland Murray channels so beautifully in his Parallax Series (1992-1995). With intricate twists, pockets and folds, these pieces emerge slowly along a vertical axis from a variety of hard woods (red oak, mahogany, hickory, ash, cherry) studded on occasion by spikes or a found object. Some of the undulated columns stand on claw-like feet, while others wear crowns of thorns or are topped with pitchforks or pinwheels. Referencing ceremonial staffs, walking sticks, weapons, tools and fetish sculptures, their obvious human dimension invites an uneasy corporal contact. Their charm and elegance is counter pointed by a prickly sense of danger, even dread. With so much contemporary art concerning itself with investigations of the consumer-based transience of our culture, these sculptures are a refreshing reminder of the power and soulfulness of a sacred object.

OSCAR VARESE

“What you see is what you see!” Frank Stella’s famous quip stressing the innate object-hood of art is a good starting point for considering Oscar Varese’s untitled wood reliefs. They are first and foremost carefully crafted things, their concreteness heightened by crisp lines and intense colour. They also stem from that particular 20th century fascination with abstraction that Stella was reinforcing with his remark, a language of refinement and distillation towards pure form, with a lineage that takes us from Russian Constructivism to Montreal’s plasticiens. The concept of the abstract remains a potent one in the visual arts, but it is now tempered with an appreciation of the mongrel as well as the purebred. Funky formalism or eccentric abstraction are terms sometimes used to describe the glories of this particular twilight zone and it is here where Oscar Varese’s work plays out. In the way Varese’s pieces pixelate and mirror form, stretch and morph geometry, one senses that the computer or at least the electronic era is involved here. Quite literally edgy, they somehow maintain their abstract integrity while flirting with the world of recognizable forms. The spectator’s mind races through references (musical instruments, subway maps, propellers, hockey sticks), before coming home to roost on these marvelous, chromatic pieces of wood.

Text by David Elliott, Associate Professor and Chair, Studio Arts