Reviews

The Globe and Mail, Saturday, September 20 1975

AT THE GALLERIES, by James Purdie

FIVE WITH PROMISE

Five other new, promising and future-oriented artists are exhibiting together until Sept. 25 at Aggregation Gallery.

They are Janet Hendershot, Janis Hoogstraten-Campbell and Jim Stewart, who are painters, and Mike Hudson and Bill Kort, who build art constructions. Works by the five fill two floors of the gallery and, although their concepts and techniques are in no way comparable, they balance and support each other.

Stewart and Hudson have more to offer than the others, although you may disagree when you see the Hendershot and Hoogstraten-Campbell abstract canvases and Kort’s wall constructions. Kort uses objects like clocks without hands, mounted and renamed with Letraset.

Hudson, on the other hand, works with found objects and the raw materials of nature to demonstrate forces beyond the control of man that create and destroy simultaneously. Included are the first four pieces from a continuing construction Hudson calls One Moment from Easter Sunday.

Each piece can be viewed individually or as part of the larger work, which may continue to have sections added for another year. The Toronto Shoreline Section, for example, consists of a badly corroded toy spade mounted in a glass case and surrounded by a patch of sand and gravel, a beach of sorts in a box.

Stewart’s oil paintings, being shown for the first time, are from a series he calls Tarot Forms. They consist of thickly-layered canvases in earth colours, representing everyday reality, but pierced here and there by unexpected windows into a more spacious country of the mind

The Globe and Mail, Saturday, April 15, 1978

At the Galleries

"Elegance and Power" by James Purdie

Issacs is not alone this week in featuring the work of contemporary Canadian artists. David Mirvish Gallery on Markham Street is showing a group of elegant new figure-and-ground abstractions by Erik Gamble, Sable-Castelli Gallery on Hazelton Avenue at Scollard is showing photographs with drawings by Suzy Lake of Montreal, Aggregation Gallery on Front Street is making a very appealing case for the eccentric but powerful abstractions of Jim Stewart and the Art Works on Bleecker Street commands attention for the lyrical, monochromatic abstractions of Sam Caputo.

Gamble, who is rapidly establishing himself as one of the leading abstract painters of the new wave in Toronto, is showing work that is disciplined, lyrical and unpredictable in terms of shapes and colour. Caputo shows similar disciplines and poetic harmonies, but he is more interested in a dispersed imagery than in the use of bold shapes as vehicles for colour. His personal discipline involves a narrowly limited range of colour.

Stewart is another artist who cannot be categorized. Some viewers find affinities in his new glazed and layered abstractions with the work of two other prominent young Toronto abstractionists: Paul Hutner and Alex Cameron. This may be true, but affinities should not be mistaken in this case for similarities. Stewart, like Gamble, Hutner and Cameron, is an original, not a member of any movement.

ArtMagazine

February/March 1980

Season in Review by Martin Heavisides

Jim Stewart at Aggregation Gallery

(November 10 - 28, 1979)

The best of these pieces are like jazz improvisations on canvas. The syncopated rhythms of the base colours are laid upon the primary surface, with skitters of colour pulsing in sudden darts, varying in size, shape and tempo, as if above the surface of that gloss coat. This secondary surface seems to dance electrostatically into and away from the first one, the way solo passages will jump from one end to the other of the prime rhythm being set down by a gifted jazz nonet, at the moment when the music is really tight, and hot, and then a solo will burrow right into the heart of the main instrumental, and possibly bury itself, or conceivably wriggle out the other side. That’s how the reds and yellows and blue-streaked whites and little pool of lighter blue with three black thick streaks at the bottom play off against the deeper blue that makes the melody line of Volcano. The same set of colours, differently applied, with a less smoky feel and with a base coat partly the black that was a minor rhythm of Volcano, are the subject of the improvisation Inner Sky. These and Sightings are the smallest canvasses in the show (8" by 10") and yet if they are not the best pieces they are certainly the most virtuoso. They make me think of a puppet company, Punchinello, trying to perform Lysistrata or King Lear, and succeeding.

The larger works are vivid and lovely, they have marvellous colour textures, every one of what I have called his "melody line" coats is a poem, and a revelation of the forms and possibilities of the complex colour-rhythms he is employing. There is not a minor work in the series, the only one I actively dislike being Blue Heart which centres around a peacock-blue heart. That overly literal image washes over the harmonies of colour, shape and tone he tries to establish in this piece.

The rest of the works have the serenity, the discords clashing into grander (never resolved) harmonies that the small works have, but none of the larger works have the same intensity, with the exception of two pieces: Thought, whose melody line is earth, clay and dirt and mud and autumn leaves melding and swirling round a central disc in pink. The intensity is very quiet in contrast to Volcano, the syncopation subdued, the rhythms that play against the base rhythm all lying quietly on the canvas within that primary, rather than shooting off fireworks that seem to live above the skin of the surface as they do in Volcano and Inner Sky.

In Harpoon 2, the other exception among the larger works, there is the same rich modulating-deep-blue rhythm as Volcano and Inner Sky , and a colour harmony that is a miracle of toning and shade. A diamond enclosing an oblong gives the effect of a mandala with strings of paint, red with yellow tips, stretched across it. Red calligraphic doodles vibrate against the deep blue in the mandala space, making a violet hum that sears and also soothes. An intricate network of filigree bright blue (made I would guess, by drawing fingers or a knife over the dark blue surface coat) webs and hedges the mandala round about. Beyond it all, there is that deep smoky blue, with little fingers of yellow darting and marching across it.

Basically I would have to say that I was blown away by this show. Good stuff.

The Globe and Mail, October 10, 1981

Art

By John Bentley Mays

Late in the sixties or in the early seventies - it’s hard to pinpoint the exact date, though it happened in New York and Europe at about the same time - art stopped being just what met the eye. Since that revolution, the meaning of art objects has had to be sought, not just in the materials and formal matters of the works, but in the history of its concepts, in philosophies of mind and the world, and in the private quirks and public stances of the artist. Nobody understood this utterly new situation and nobody understands it now - but few would doubt it’s here to stay.

Jim Stewart’s oil paintings are now on view at the Aggregation Gallery (83 Front Street E), and are among the most reluctant paintings in town. They seem to stand in a little place all their own, mumbling to each other softly, so they can’t quite be heard. They seem to exist in a looking-glass world where everything ricochets or bends, and nothing goes straight. And they seem quite content to stay in there for good.

A scrap of legible imagery emerges - a palm-like figure, a rod, what could be tiny rockets blasting off - then fades back at once into the abstract areas of muted colour as just an elaborate scrape or scratch. Imbedded in those painterly fields, however, the little thing won’t stay still as a mere mark, but comes shouldering up from the ground as a full-fledged representational image.

Are these image paintings, then, with abstract leanings? I think not. They begin to make sense only when you dump such art-world categories, and accept these works as entries (each one bears a date) in an ongoing diary of the artist’s personal struggle with himself.

The problem is that Stewart has not made up his mind what kind of artist he wants to be. His method of work is basically formalist: he works his placid oil colours over the canvas with a palette knife or his fingers, developing broad layered skins which can be punctured, peeled away or scored to add complexity to the surface.

He is also compelled by such schematic images as the wand from the Tarot, fences, the angularity of buildings - but is apparently also worried about letting them into his art. They are kept sketchy, and on a very tight rope, and they aren’t allowed to do much. And when they start getting uppity, he kills them.

The sequence of five paintings arranged chronologically (from right to left) on Aggregation’s west wall shows the doing-in of the buildings and the Tarot wand with the green sprig on top. In each successive painting, the central upright wand is surrounded by stormier tumults of scraping and thrusting - until Dawn, which is a complete nervous breakdown of structure and surface. It works, however: in the next (and the most recent) painting, the buildings and sprouting wands are gone for good and new, furtive images take their place.

These periodic ritual sacrifices of imagery seem basic to Stewart’s artist project - surely one of the most curious being pursued by a local painter.

ArtMagazine 1982 Feb/Mar/Apr

by Marshall Webb

Jim Stewart at Aggregation Gallery

(September 26 - October 14)

On each of his completed canvases, Jim Stewart inscribes the day, month, and year. Such notation is not integral to the work itself, but it does turn the paintings into a kind of visual diary. But this is not a diary of daily events; rather, it is the diary of the events or musings or ramblings in his mind. He refers to his method as "intuitive". Another could call it automatic. Labels matter little, for the method is still the same: he is able to separate the conscious from the unconscious self and let his fingers and hands trace their images on the canvas.

It is unfortunate that Stewart titles these works. Palm, Emerge, Sword, Lights, Dawn are conscious vocabulary and ask most viewers to appreciate the work in some kind of traditionally representational way. Far better to have resorted to "untitled" so that the viewer’s mind would work and not be guided. Then, it would be interesting to see what emerged.

The majority of canvases seem to depict in suitably hazy fashion a kind of landscape or cityscape. Often we are on the opposite shore looking across a river towards a city whose sombre shapes rise on either side of an open passage - a passage that admits entry to the city, the painting and some far beyond. Even those works which don’t depict this scene contain some kind of central opening through which we pass. Black and White is a veritable road-way lined with red and yellow markings; the painted surface whisks us along, to an unknown destination.

A more obvious motif in Stewart’s work is a palm tree which began life as a wand in a Tarot pack. It is one of the many images stored away in his mind. Except for a change in the colour of its fronds or the markings on the trunk, the palm tree is always a central image, often in the midst of the passageway described earlier. From March to May 1981, this tree underwent some playful adaptations until, in Dawn, it seems to stand at the centre of an apocalyptic vision. The surfaces are frantic, almost violent. The browns and blues which dominate, echo the similar colours of the Sistine Chapel’s great apocalypse. Two shapes, reminiscent of Giacometti sculptures, stand in the burned-out landscape, sentinels to the act of judgement. Although rather over painted, the painting is a stirring image.

A number of other violent images occur in these new works, but for the most part we are shown happy, spirited pieces. Lights has a Mediterranean joie de vivre about it. It is one of the more representational pieces and yet the various markings let us know that this is not a tourist’s nostalgia at work.

On the whole, Stewart’s works captured a range of emotions that one doesn’t often find in a one-man show. His paintings give credence to Conrad’s belief that the mind holds all the past, present and future.

Unpublished review by Gerta Moray

Jim Stewart at Wynick/Tuck Gallery, May 1983

Jim Stewart’s earlier paintings have often hovered on the borderline between abstraction and the evocation of horizon, building or trees. His latest works seem to come down to earth with the direct representation of landscape - but only to call that representation into question with the startling intrusion of abstract lines and shapes.

Each painting in the current show is based on a landscape subject: a wooded glade obliquely penetrated by shafts of sunlight; the dark interior of a forest; a clump of trees silhouetted against the sunset. It is clear that Stewart chooses a landscape image which is quite different from that of the Group of Seven, or of contemporary landscape painters who attempt to define the special character of specifically Canadian landscape. Stewart’s images are rooted in the common ancestry of all these painters - nineteenth century landscape strongly tinged with the Romantic tradition. The ancient, solitary oak, the hushed forest interior of Courbet and the Barbizon painters could symbolize the otherness of nature, its qualities of ageless continuity, and a superpersonal power into which the artist could project his longings. The response to such symbolism has become so common a ground in our culture that it remains a feature of work as diverse as that of the Group of Seven and Walt Disney.

While Stewart shares this heritage, he focuses on aspects of nature which can be found almost anywhere. He traces the ballet-like gesture of branch, twig and clump of foliage inside a wood, or the heraldic outlining of a single tree against the sky. He paints this not as a direct, on-the-spot study of light and colour effects, but from the inner eye, like an Oriental artist who has through long empathy assimilated the rhythms and structure of living forms. His representations are therefore plausible, but they emphasize aspects of the view singled out by the sensibility and memory of an individual.

Why, then, disrupt this vision of nature with an incongruous overlay of abstract brush marks - lines and dashes, bars, diamonds and triangles? These puzzling configurations suggest diagrams and hasty notations in a code the meaning of which we are left to guess. The teasing counterpoint between abstract notation and more realistic representation seems to emphasize the artificial nature of both.

The artist uses his powers of illusion like a magician; the surface of the canvas becomes his theatre. With a fluid, painterly technique the forms and space of a landscape are created and draw us into a world beyond the canvas. This illusion is at once both shattered and rivalled by brightly coloured lines or shapes painted across the centre of the canvas. The colour contrasts make these appear to float, setting up in turn both a fresh declaration of paint on surface, and a new spatial sensation. In one painting of a black forest interior (Untitled, 1982) the trees part in the centre like stage flats, to reveal a solid blue plane (a sky?) on which floats a white painted shape. Is this a graphic symbol for a church, or itself another window opening in the curtain of blue?

In the face of such disruptive jumps in idiom, the unity of the pictures is secured by the overall painterly handling of the landscape and abstract marks. These paintings have the same lush sense of paint as material as was found in Stewart’s earlier works. He creates an amazing variety of vibrant greys and browns by painting with wet oil into a wet under paint of primary colours. The top layer of paint is then inflected by the colours beneath, and a rapid drawing of details can be obtained by scratching through the paint layer with a sharp tool. While we are forced to make conceptual leaps from one symbol-system and mode of reality to another, the painting remains integrated by the tight balancing of diverse elements into a carefully unified design. There is, in addition, an interesting chronological progression in this series of paintings. At the outset, abstract lines, patterns and symbols are drawn onto the landscape image, which may also be discreetly framed by a coloured border. Then, carpet-like, the abstract design becomes the primary element, and is in turn invaded and disrupted by the naturalistic forms.

In earlier abstract paintings which were executed rapidly and intuitively, Stewart suggested moods, conflicts and psychic events through the interplay of shapes and graphic elements. In this respect he is the heir of the surrealist automatists like Miro, and of artists like Klee and Kandinsky, who sought direct counterparts in colour and line for the world of feeling and imagination. Some interesting parallels could be drawn between the kinds of shapes and symbols arrived at spontaneously by artists who share these goals. The kinds of paradox which Stewart’s latest paintings seem to state - that of the illusory relationship between image, symbol and reality - may recall rather the works of Rene Magritte. Magritte painted objects with a deadpan photographic realism, but through their rigorous organization and strange juxtaposition called into question our assumption of a normal world. A massive rock might hover in the sky above a seascape; an image of a pipe be inscribed "This is not a pipe". The counterpoint of Jim Stewart’s images is his own, as is the painterly handling and integration of the surface. But his paintings, too, present us with a dislocated equation which preserves its mystery.

ArtMagazine, Fall 1983

The Season in Review, By Anna Babinska

Jim Stewart at Wynick / Tuck Gallery (May 7 - May 25)

Jim Stewart appears to be one of those painters whose talent flows easily and naturally from within, blessed with the freedom gained from the lack of a fine arts training coupled to a healthy resistance to any current trendiness of style. Since his first solo show eight years ago, he has evolved a very individual visual vocabulary. Although overtly abstract, his earlier works nevertheless used forms characterized by their potential symbolism: triangle, mandala, circle, and a wand-like shape similar to that found on a Tarot card. Since 1979, as well, the imagery and pictorial structure have also tended to refer to landscape while at the same time maintaining the gestural, semiautomatic handling particular to his work.

In this exhibition of new work, those latent figurative images assert themselves in a series of medium sized oils and small acrylics, all untitled save for the date of their completion incised into the painted surface together with the artist’s signature. This, as well as the chronological sequence of the hanging, emphasizes the autobiographical nature of the paintings, which also continue to display the artist’s fondness for boldness and rapidity of execution, and for scratching and marking the painted surface.

With a compelling immediacy and freshness, all the paintings in this show deal with the representation of remembered landscape. Two main distinct compositional types are in evidence: on the one hand, the landscape is the background on which a simple, abstract shape or pattern is centrally superimposed; on the other, it becomes the repository of another, even more simplified, fragment of landscape. The work titled June 24 1982 exemplifies the first approach, while September 24 1982 typifies the second. In this latter piece, the dark and dense forest becomes the foil for an apparition, a patch of brilliant blue, itself the setting for a white polygonal shape surrounded by short horizontal strokes: a memory of water, a sail perhaps?

The image thus imposed like a quotation upon the landscape takes on even more mysterious overtones in June 15 1982. Here, the forest is a glade in which hovers a strangely haunting oblong shape, purple in colour; nature made more mystical still through this unwanted intrusion.

This feeling of mysticism, or at least of a certain spirituality, pervades the best of Stewart’s paintings, and lifts them out of the purely decorative. And even when the work remains at that level (as in February 2, 1983), the lushness of colour, the richness of the textures and the controlled vigour of handling sets it apart and arrests the eye and mind.

Jim Stewart is a practitioner of Aikido, a martial art that combines highly disciplined movement with controlled outbursts of energy. There are parallels to this in his paintings: not only in the combination of natural and symbolic forms, but especially in the contrast between the ordered structure and the expressive, emotive facture. One also gets the undeniable feeling that Stewart is one of those artists for whom the act of painting is a form of spiritual ritual, a personal journey of exorcism from the unknown. How rare and moving a gift to those who wish to recognize it!

Artist

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