In The Fragile Surface, an exhibition of recent work at Gallery St. Laurent + Hill, David Kaarsemaker adds to the dialogue between painting and photography. His pictures are surely about painting, representational while verging on abstraction, the canvasses rendered diaphanous through the application of colour and thinly layered images. They are also about photography in that they construct images that appear to be accurate depictions of the visible world while being faithful to the way that lens-based analogues can be blurred and out of focus. More directly, photographs are partly the subject of the paintings. The processes by which the works are made generate their dramatic interest, and though fully on view, as in the painting Cross-Section 1, they add to their mystery by bordering on the metaphysical. Inasmuch as paintings and photographs are about memory through their commemoration of people and places, Kaarsemaker’s process engages with space and architecture not unlike the “method of loci” of the immemorial rhetoricians. 
David Kaarsemaker, Cross-Section 1, 2015, oil and charcoal on canvas
Recalling the orators who would memorize a speech by placing its various sections in the order of the rooms of a well-remembered building, Kaarsemaker tells private stories by rendering images that superimpose places and spaces from his past and present, incorporating architectural models and personal photographs. The paintings have the voyeuristic quality of looking into the lit windows of buildings at night, and suggest the omniscient view one has of the cross section of a doll’s house with all of the dramatic tableaus it puts on display. However, even though a viewer that is aware of Kaarsemaker’s process can make out some of the details of the paintings’ construction, the many-layered images that result make their distinct stages unrecognizable. They appear as images that come from a dream the details of which vanish upon waking, and remain just on the other side of definition.
The trick that memory plays transforms the spaces we remember over time. And just as these spaces are subject to change, so too are paintings, photographs, and people. Kaarsemaker’s biography reveals a peripatetic life, traversing the US, Burkina Faso, and many places in Canada, where the artist now makes a home in the Ottawa area. Kaarsemaker’s paintings are mobile in the manner of today’s digital technology. His paintings, such as Cross-Section 4, evoke the inner glow of networked flat screen monitors and equally ubiquitous hand-held tablets and phones. The paintings share the uprooted quality of a digital image that can be anywhere at any time, connected simultaneously to a global, dispersed social network, always at hand but ironically untouchable.
Gallery St. Laurent + Hill: http://www.galeriestlaurentplushill.com/
David Kaarsemaker: The Fragile Surface continues until February 25.
Michael Davidge is an artist, writer, and independent curator who lives in Ottawa, Ontario. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Border Crossings, BlackFlash, and C Magazine, among other publications. He is Akimblog’s Ottawa correspondent and can be followed on Twitter @MichaelDavidge.
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David Kaarsemaker at Gallery St. Laurent + Hill in Ottawa
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