Born in Weston-Super Marie
England in 1966, Gary Evans was raised in Oakville Ontario. A graduate
from the Class of 1989, Ontario College of Art, Evans currently resides
and works in Alliston Ontario.
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Small Bush Study #8
Oil on masonite
30 x 24 inches
1996 |
Gary Evan thinks of
his paintings as existing in a state of ambiguity between realism and
abstraction. For the audience, this ambiguity can lead to an odd visual
experience since the viewer’s eye never has a place to settle. There are
shapes and elements that emerge from the picture plane and the
conventional devises of painting are easy enough to discern. But Evans
delivers all the pieces to us in a state of Flux.
Clearly, Evans is not interested in building naturalistic
scenery. His defining interest is to create new visual spaces that
resonate between the known pictorial world and the unknown world of
contemplation. In the process, his work subtly probes the subjectivity of
artmaking by distilling some of its perceptual units and compressing them
in a shallow depth of field, like specimens under a microscope slide. When
we factor in the artist’s own subjective selectivity, we would expect him
to offer us a plausible model to explain how to decipher the semiotic code
of the natural world. Yet Evans wisely avoids an easy diagram, and thereby
acknowledges the folly of over-simplifying the complexity of perceptual
systems.
It should be pointed out that there is an embedded
structure in these paintings. In fact, Evans shows us glimpses of his
formal training, done at a time when it was common to question the notions
of originality. And through his display of painting conventions, he makes
us aware that the objective structure of signs is at work. But if we
accept that the artist is using the perceptual units of art like
metalanguage of nature, Gary Evan’s paintings teem with poetic
complexities that embrace many oppositions, equivalences, and inversions.
At its best, his structure parallels out sensory array. Our own perpetual
units, the acts of smelling, feeling, seeing, etc., help us know the
physical world as we smell it, feel it, see it, and remember it. If we can
appreciate Gary Evan’s’ mediation on perception, we realize that our
comprehensive knowledge of the natural work should remain mysterious,
elusive, and ultimately resistant to all forms of categorization, no
matter how sophisticated.
