Just as Jack Gladney, the protagonist in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, hides a troublesome professional secret (despite having established the academic discourse of Hitler studies, he can’t read or write in German), I maintain a career of sorts as an art critic in the absence of the usual credentials for the gig. I never went to art school and only attended a smidgen of an art history course in my university days. I get by on being an autodidact (half a decade sitting in a public gallery helped out) and my Philosophy/Cultural Studies degrees. The latter are more than enough to guide me through the post-ocular, après-Duchamp art of the last fifty years, and as a rule I’m much more at home in the realm of the conceptual than I am in the visual (and yes, I know that sounds bad given what I write about each week); however, my critical muscles get their best workout (no pain, no gain) when grappling with the challenge of turning art that predominantly addresses the eyes into words that go directly to the brain. And yes, I’m talking about painting here. 
Denyse Thomasos, Burial at Gorée, 1993, oil on canvas
The Inside exhibition at Blackwood Gallery is right up this alley with each of the participating artists – a bunch of who have some association with the Fine Arts program at the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus where the gallery is found – providing their own idiosyncratic methodological twist to the activity of painting and, in particular, the tradition of the interior wall work. This means I can finally see the systematic way in which Dorian Fitzgerald creates his Herculean paint-by-numbers masterpieces care of a piece in progress (though, in contrast to all the other works, this one is by necessity found on the floor). Marc Bell also contributes a work seemingly mid-creation with a floor-to-ceiling replica of the perspective lines from the campus’s Deerfield Hall. Sara Hartland-Rowe’s wallwork scatters a crowd of illustrated portraits across the expanse of the main gallery’s biggest wall, while Maria Hupfield intrudes on the third dimension by including colour-coded objects à la Jessica Stockholder. Denise Thomasos's giant abstraction is wall-esque in scale though really just a conventionally mounted canvas, but who cares in the end when it draws your attention like a tractor beam, and the dense black and white criss-cross brushstokes (more like slashes than strokes) vibrate in front of your eyes. Her work is proof that, despite the novelty of your mode of presentation, it all comes back to how effectively you can wield some pigment and make it sing. When faced with such a challenge as responding to lines, colours, shapes, etc., I revert to the same gauge I used to use when listening to free jazz and just trust my gut. In the end, it generally works better than my brain. 
Anders Oinonen, Phiz, 2015, oil on canvas
I can't do that when looking at Anders Oinonen's paintings at Cooper Cole because they play a different game entirely – one that makes my instincts go, “Eugh, I shouldn’t like this.” His cartoony faces emerging from wide swaths of gaudy colour that hover between abstraction and kitsch feel like they belong in another era – probably the seventies and some swinger’s apartment lounge in California. Many fingers point to a trippy, eye-popping stylishness that isn’t serious, isn’t hard, isn’t demanding. In fact – and this is where I change my tune while my eyes debate my intellect and my gut does an about-face – there are plenty of things to like here, plenty of things to enjoy, plenty of pleasure to be found in the ice cream sherbet colours and the playful wobbling between representation and gesture. It might all be some hipster’s trick to mine the formative aesthetic experiences of my childhood (seeing Modern Art in the background of The Rockford Files) and my initial resistance may be a kneejerk uptightness that hates to have fun. I end up carrying these pictures around in my head, glancing at them with my mind’s eye in order to test myself. Do I feel what I feel? Do I think what I think? I haven’t answered those questions yet, but it seems that the most visual of the art this week is also the most intellectually demanding. Fancy that.
Blackwood Gallery: http://blackwoodgallery.ca/index.html
Inside continues until March 1.
Cooper Cole Gallery: http://coopercolegallery.com/exhibitions
Anders Oinonen continues until February 14.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Inside at the Blackwood Gallery | Anders Oinonen at Cooper Cole
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