Canadian Art (Spring 2011)

Chris Kline, Installation View, Galerie René Blouin, 2010. Photo:Richard Max Tremblay. Courtesy: Galerie René Blouin.

In his fourth solo exhibition at Galerie René Blouin [October 16 – November 20, 2010], Montreal painter Chris Kline explored the ever-changing effects of visible (and invisible) phenomena, with an astute eye for detail and a generous embrace of the ineffable. The two new series on view sensuously occupied an un-nameable space replete with grace, thoughtfulness and splendour.

In the main space, Kline lined the walls with long, horizontal canvases of subtle, nearly white chromatic variations. These works’ surfaces are covered with millions of miniscule glass beads, which shimmer in the light and shift with the viewer’s slightest movement. Occasionally, the pieces show the slight mauve, grey or blue tint of the layers of paint underneath. The effect is fleeting, like catching a glimpse of a facial expression that passes before we can seize it. The desire to “watch” these paintings (rather than to “look at” them) is a curious reversal of what one might expect of almost all-white canvases. That is, rather than being rebuffed by their silence and emptiness, we are seduced. It is as if we are being beckoned to immerse ourselves in their crystalline depths, to enter them as if they were imaginary landscapes.

These ambiguous surfaces create a productive tension with the comparatively frank works of Kline’s second series, parenthetically titled “tape.” The pieces are made of thin, finely woven poplin, which is distended over wooden stretchers readily visible below the surface. On each canvas, Kline has painted a near-vertical line the width of painter’s tape. The lines are sharp, compositionally exact, opaque and, in comparison to the poplin, unforgiving. Their adherence to the delicate substrate seems aggressive—not gesturally, but in that they suggest a latent potential to tear away and leave the poplin in shreds.

If one were to consider Kline’s stardust “landscapes” as chic re-workings of Kazimir Malevich and Robert Rauschenberg, the tape-paintings call forth Robert Ryman, Donald Judd and, paradoxically, Barnett Newman. These five precursors have little in common with each other, and Kline does not directly engage with their legacies or their styles. Yet if we imagine a dialogue between Malevich’s pursuit of spiritual truths, Rauschenberg’s material explorations and groundbreaking white monochrome, the reduced and unassuming compositions of Ryman and Judd’s rigorous demonstration of perceptual uncertainty, we come close to defining the artistic and philosophical richness of Kline’s exhibition.

As for the life-drive that courses up Newman’s solid, resolute stripes? In Kline’s tape-paintings, the stripes are broken and off-axis. Modesty rather than certainty defines this exhibition, and serenity rather than struggle. Kline’s paintings give moments of inner sanctity an expressible form.