Daniel Vlček

For the last seven years Daniel Vlček’s paintings have replaced the traditional brush with vinyl records. These paintings have been experiments wherein the artist traced the vinyl records’ shapes into wet paint, layering them upon one another, creating moiré effects while attempting to visualize sound patterns and wavelengths. The reasoning behind using vinyl records were various, each being an invitation to explore a different theme or concept, such as industrialization, the commoditization of the music industry, and mass production. In the past, Vlček most often turned to canvas for his work, with the occasional wall coming into play. Strict geometrical shapes, sharp corners and edges dominated his paintings.

 “Visually Addictive,” the current joint exhibition withCanadian artist Ron Martin, marks a departure for Vlček. For the first time the artist turned to the CD as a marking tool instead of a brush. Moreover, he replaced canvas with birch wood. Vlček claims...“I was attracted to this material because of thefact that it was made in Canada, a land vast and wild, full of space andnature”. The material presented a challenge that, allegedly, took the artist by surprise. The new substrate reacted and behaved differently: suddenly his paintings started to fill up with organic, curved shapes unlike anything he had been compelled to do in the past. “…I found this difficult to reconcile, fighting to come to a justification for it, admits Vlček, despite this, I realized that I had somehow intuitively created these paintings, as if instructed by the material they were on. In theend my solution was to create paired paintings, one featuring white organic lines with glimpses of birch wood to be exhibited alongside paintings featuring harsher geometrical edges.” This results in pairs referencing passion andspontaneity on the one hand and logic and premeditation on the other, two opposing poles illustrated by art. 

 The artist’s use of the CD rather than the long-favored vinyl addresses questions about digitalization and, by extension, virtualization. After all, the CD was not only revolutionary in making soundand music even more portable, but also for being a digital format as opposed toits analog predecessors. In this way it opened the door for music to join thevirtual realm. The CD was a gateway to music and sound’s transfiguration into files utterly untethered by a physical carrier (music is increasingly morefrequently streamed rather than played). Ironically it is simultaneously, as of now, the last physical carrier of sound and music. It therefore occupies aspecial space between nostalgia and innovation and materiality and weightlessness. The CD’s appearance in Vlček’s new-paired seriesis hence fitting; it too is an attempt at reconciliation, a bridge between reasoning, and a meditation between hard science and transcendental emotion.

 An invitation from Daniel Vlček and Ewelina Chiu

It has been my great pleasure to have had a chance to participate in this exhibition. During my time here I’ve also had the opportunity to play a few shows with my dark wave, avant pop music duo project, ba:zel. Together with ba:zel’s other half, Ewelina Chiu, we’ve played two shows: one in Ottawa (Pressed) and Montreal (Le Cagibi). We look forward to playing a final show on the 22nd of February in Montreal at La Vitrola.

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Ron Martin

Ron Martin's paintings have always addressed painting itself at its material base, bringing to immediate attention the most basic physical elements that constitute the language of painting. Particular attention is paid to the kind and condition of the paint used, its quantity, and the means by which it is applied to and distributed over the canvas surface. In the end Martin's paintings are occasions of self-conscious reflection largely because of such direct matter-of-fact specificity. For Martin this specificity has always encompassed both the artist’s physical interaction with paint matter and, at the same time, the viewer’scomplex, complex many leveled response to it and to the outward vestiges of the artist’s interaction with it.

Neither didactic nor rhetorical, Martin’s paintings serve a critical purpose. The work makes the viewer aware of the ways uniquely generic to painting in which painting engages the viewer: it renders palpable and present the fundamental medium of painting as a language which underpins even establish styles ofpainting, traditional and contemporary, representational or abstract.

Martin’s investigations of the formal and material elements of painting have long been confined to acrylic paint in the series To Foil Oils, Phase I-IV, however Martin addresses the medium of oil paint. With face III (1987) and phase IV (1987-1998)of the To Foil Oils series, his exploration of that medium attains a fullness and an exuberance that marks these works as exceptional. One way to think of the To Foil Oils is to see them in terms of the task of setting 100 colours ofthe Windsor & Newton series in to play on a single canvas and to do so in away that the singularity and the brilliant clarity of each is preserved and enhanced. The colours in the manufacturer’s series of oil paints are presented to us asdirectly as possible, fresh from the tube, as it were. There is in fact a special sheen to these oil colours that is only found in oil paint that has been squeezed directly and evenly from the mouth of a metal tube container. Furthermore, Martin adopts a format in the To Foil Oils which palpably embodies the material integrity particular to the medium of oils and which vividly conveys the “purity”of each and every colour with equal intensity and strength. The psychic energy that these colours hold for us appears grounded inextricably in the physical substance of the paint. This union adamantly preserves the fundamental tension between the two.

Walter Klepac