Light Moves
Gary Evans
new paintings
October 21 - November 19, 2022
Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present new paintings by Gary Evans. This latest exhibition reflects several subject interests that are occurring together in his studio.
These words from Gary:
"The paintings in the exhibition Light Moves are mostly attempts to paint an engagement or the feeling of an experience in nature. Because the scenes are mundane in many ways I'm hoping that, through the re-imagining of them, to reference the feeling of enchantment that contemplating our experience of the phenomenon of nature can bring about.
"Light and changing qualities of light, and light sources, both eternal and ephemeral. are also a subject of the work. For without light painting is moot.
"The paintings also have sensations as subjects. They attempt to capture experiential and felt realities in different ways. While some share the visual subjectivity of looking, others use the figure as a space to embody experience. Both are speculative, subjective, and become more poetic and imaginative through the process of making. The figures are intended only as resemblances, sites of colour and textural exploration, referencing both actual space and attempting to “picture” feeling, simultaneously finding imaginative ways of contextualizing experience.
"The largest painting in the exhibition, Painting Landscape, functions as an allegory, stepping back from the subjective immersion in the other works, to look at the larger project I have undertaken.
The process of painting starts (for me) as an experience of reality. In reacting to natural phenomena and appearance, I (and probably many artists) invent expressive visual forms by considering and reacting to the patterns experienced there, by finding a matrix from which to extrapolate. This kind of shorthand, a subjective reaction that has a beginning in the act of translating shape, colour and form, can become a crutch or prop, as much about the artist as it is about the actual objects in space being described.
In the painting Painting Landscape this imaginative interpretive approach has become a central column of “matter” that the figure, painting on the left, must see past to get at the reference site on the right.
The contained space of a painting is a separate experience, a bridge between realities. This is both a problem and a blessing and it is this paradox that animates much of the work in the exhibition." -- Gary Evans (2022)
GARY EVANS was born in Weston Super Mare, England and resides in Alliston, Ontario. His paintings challenge traditional notions of perception and experience of the Canadian landscape. Evans states, “abstraction for me has always been extrapolated from the real. In using it that way I hope to talk about the phenomena of perception that we all experience.”
Of his more than twenty solo exhibitions highlights include a touring survey exhibition of his work, Seeing Things: The Paintings of Gary Evans, curated by Stuart Reid, which toured Canada between 2000-2002 as well as a survey of paintings, Station, curated by James Patten at The Art Gallery Of Windsor in 2008 and a 15-year survey, Farther Afield, curated by Renee van der Avoird at the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie, in 2016. His work was the subject of a 25-year collection-based survey at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in July-August, 2020.
Evans is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art (1989) and is the past Coordinator of the School of Design And Visual Art, Georgian College, Barrie, ON. Evans has been exhibiting at PPCA since 1995.