It is only the sacred things that are worth touching – The Picture of Dorian Grey, Ch. IV

PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN // DORIAN FITZGERALD

As I walked through the doors at the Clint Roenisch Gallery last night, I wasn’t quite prepared to see what I was faced with. I had been told that Dorian’s paintings were generally, big. But even from several feet away I was intrigued by the feeling that what I was looking at (painting of a Chinese dragon) was paradoxically flat and three dimensional… I had to move closer to figure out—“What exactly has he done here?”

Up close, his paintings are just as provocative as they are from the “proper viewing distance,” several feet back. Dorian’s signature technique involves carving and edging caulk on the canvas, a process that makes small negative spaces, in which he pours acrylic paint that dry in pools.  His paintings are like liquid mosaics, landscapes of frozen jell-o lakes. In another piece—the one of Elton John’s closet—the frames of the tens of glasses represented are all done in a “free-pour” style that looked like it had been executed with a patient scientificity: knowing the viscosity of the paints in their various drying stages to achieve both a mixing of paints and of layering them. When asked, Dorian described the process as an “excessive paint-by-numbers.” Personally, I consider this a deflection. He was very modest about his work, using simple terms to describe what is clearly a thorough artistic process; as rich methodologically as it is conceptually.  

The three paintings in the exhibit were of cultural artefacts: a Fabergé egg, Chinese dragon and Elton John’s closet. Past subjects of Dorian’s include: a throne room, a giant centre-piece from Oprah Winfrey’s Oscars party, and Gabana’s yacht (of Dolce and Gabana). Interested in the excessive materiality of our time, his paintings at Property of a Gentleman were counterpoised against a giant photograph of a nebula in space, taken from the Hubble telescope; a phenomenon of excess only truly conceivable by Nature.

Property of a Gentleman runs from March 11 – May 17 at the Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto.