Paul Julien-Tanti and Cyrus Smith

Here's Hoping You're Swell

March 9 - March 21

Paul Petro Multiples + Small Works is pleased to announce exhibitions by Toronto-based artist and musician Paul Julien Tanti and Winnipeg-based artist Cyrus Smith. These shows mark their first exhibitions in Toronto.

Both artists will be present at the opening reception.

This exhibition has been organized by Andrew Cecil. Here is Andrew's text for the show:

Cyrus Smith regularly works on a grand scale - first as a graffiti artist painting the brick walls and train cars of Winnipeg and now with acrylic on canvas. His work embodies a largess of character. Sensitivity and generosity are fused with a cynical edge using libertarian socio-political concerns of contemporary Canadians.

Smith experiments with colour and form, fusing modernist aesthetics to pressing issues like genetic modification, global warming and war. Found objects that often reference the psychology of childhood, or simply just mundane random objects reflecting the world of grown-ups, border between the political and the painterly. With an innocent approach using watercolour and collage, these small works, mounted on the west wall of our space, are well-protected by the strong code of ethics they embody as they challenge conventional ideas about aesthetics.

Paul Julien Tanti's crayon drawings might be mistaken for those of a small child. To communicate with this shamelessly self-conscious and effusive character, one must get in touch with their inner-child in order to make sense out of the insensible. Produced strictly from found material, and rendered as a stream of thought on paper, the work embodies the spirit of action painting and expressionism, and references artists like Miro and Pollock.

In these drawings, Tanti says he is illustrating jazz inspired experiments he performs with his trumpet. He attempts to illustrate these drawings in this new window installation using whatever he can.

What brings these artists' works together is their unfailingly joyful approach to art. Both use found objects that present to us a found world of the shamelessly naive, hopeful youth. Both bodies of work are sometimes purposefully ugly and intentionally child-like, stressing the beauty inherent in their colourful and often playful lines. When it comes to challenging society with public intervention, there is nothing like Cyrus Smith's exuberant graffiti or Paul Julien Tanti's late night under-the-bridge musical explorations in acoustics and performance. That is to say, these works exist against that romantic backdrop of their rebellious natures, adding beauty to chaos.

Andrew Cecil, March 2007