Carl White’s Koans

×

Expand

Carl White, “M.” no date

oil on board, 20” x 20”

Her eyes are lifted in rapture, her hands placed gently across her heart. The woman, dressed in black and posed on a dark background, seems the very model of Renaissance piety. But her skin is marked, not by flagellation or any mortification of the flesh, but by random drips of cerulean blue. One of the paintings in Carl White’s show, Koan, which opens May 12 at Calgary’s Christine Klassen Gallery, it does indeed raise puzzling questions, not least of which is why the artist chose to bring together such jarringly oppositional gestures.

White, who was introduced to classical painting in British museums as a child, is fond of such mash-ups. For instance, in Succession, he covers a Tudor-style portrait with a neon pink tag that would look at home in a subway stairwell. Another painting, Tattoo, features blue calligraphic marks atop the woman's exposed skin. This is not exclusively a gendered exercise, however. Other paintings, like Halo, Reign and A Courtier, feature male figures.

×

Expand

Carl White, “Succession,” 2018

oil on canvas, 16” x 12”

White, whose magnificent facility once earned him a job offer as a forger, paints portraits in the style of any number of historical eras, copying typical gestures and other aspects of the visual language, but not actual works. The contemporary marks he uses to disrupt these portraits can feel like violations, the gestures as brazen as throwing paint at the Mona Lisa.

You might dismiss White’s work as pandering to the market, particularly an emerging generation of art buyers fond of tattoos and tags. But a quick scope through White’s website disabuses one of that notion. Although Koan is his bluntest exploration, various contrasts have occupied him for years. Interestingly, he seems at a loss to fully explain the impulse.

×

Expand

Carl White, “Tattoo,” 2018

oil on canvas, 40” x 30”

He suspects it’s partly to do with how paintings age, becoming ever more beautiful as patinas accrue and surfaces warp and crack. He muses how notions of human beauty also shift as we age, becoming less about literal appearances and more about process and experience. “The wrinkles and the scars we acquire through life is where the beauty lies,” he observes. And, of course, each generation of viewers sees a work of art afresh, through the understandings of that  era.

White is probably driven too by remnants of teenage rebellion. Born in 1969 in Liverpool, he was exposed to art early by his father, a photographer, but became a skateboarder and listened to punk music as a teenager in Calgary, where his family relocated when he was six.

×

Expand

Carl White, “Halo,” 2018

oil on canvas, 40” x 36”

White also mentions his more recent interest in Buddhism, and its ideas about change as the only constant in life. He talks about art’s therapeutic aspects and his efforts to eliminate preconceived ideas and work with a beginner’s mind.

He recalls once spotting a teenager on an alley rooftop. From a distance, he could see the youth swinging his arm in a large circle. “All of a sudden, that spray-can valve was released and this beautiful circle was painted,” he says. “It was so interesting. It really resonated with me.

“At one level, he was a hooligan, a hoodlum defacing property. But there was also a beautiful attention to the mark, and caring about that moment. I once saw a Japanese calligrapher, a Zen calligrapher, making that beautiful mark. That kid’s mark was the same thing.” ■

Koan is on view at the Christine Klassen Gallery in Calgary from May 12 to June 23, 2018.