Billy J. McCarroll: Return/Return

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Billy J. McCarroll,"Untitled," 2017

Opening reception: Saturday, September 30 at 9 PM

Billy loves a snappy quote. “If you come to a fork in the road, take it” from baseball icon, Yogi Berra, offers valuable insight into the artist’s persona, process, and endearing sense of humour. Indeed, this philosophy seems to take hold in Return/Return at the Trianon Gallery, a circuitous journey through Billy J. McCarroll’s recent investigations in painting. Full of improvisation and quotation, one can follow his line of thought as it twists and turns, diverts and darts back from his starting point at a pixelated Picasso, to his most recent works of boldly contrasting colour and pattern.

More than simply possessing an affinity for the farcical advice of famous sports icons, Billy’s use of quotation runs deeply throughout his work. The inclusion of found objects, and the appropriation of images act as forms of citation – they combine with a spirit of humour and homage in richly layered paintings, which speak to the artist’s keen ability to riff, respond, and make connections. In early paintings from the 1970s, Billy quoted the materials and processes of hard-edged abstraction, carefully rendering trompe-l’oeil masking tape in paintings that were themselves hard-edged abstractions. Later he appropriated the visual language of golf, making Sam Snead and his illustrated how-to manual a regular within his lexicon. From the 1980s into the mid-2000s, Billy became well-known for this golf works, and for painting figuratively as a way of commenting on the act of painting figuratively.

While on this path, Billy set up three chance encounters between Sam Snead and Pablo Picasso’s bulls. In one of these paintings, Sam With Pablo’s Bulls (The History Lesson) (1999), Sam is pictured lining up a putt opposite five of Pablo’s bulls, each of which is rendered in various stages of abstraction. The saturated golf green of the lower half of the painting is divided from the top with a thick red horizon line. The top “sky” portion of the painting is made up of collaged pages from an old art history textbook, bearing headings like “Field of Painting” and “Diversity of Modern Painting.” Looking past the cheeky confrontation between representation and abstraction, this painting has turned out to be one of the important forks in the road. In preparation for this work, a pixelated internet printout of one of Pablo’s bulls triggered a new line of thought which can be followed throughout Return/Return. A portion of this printout was sampled for geometric abstractions, leading to a robust body of work focusing on the grid, and the labor of sumptuously layered and polished surfaces. Like Pablo’s bulls, slowly dispensing with representational likeness, Billy too found his way back to full-fledged abstraction.

The pages of art history textbooks also re-enter the frame. Collaged and fragmented, they serve equally as content and material: their surfaces worked, sanded, and buffed revealing the liminal center of the manila page, offering glimpses of both front and back. This is a play with surface, juxtaposition, meaning, and the loaded history of flatness in the trajectory of Modern painting. Another kind of book, John Cage’s Notations, makes an appearance, spurring an investigation of signs, markings, and language. It reminds Billy of a map, and of the imposition of markings on the surface of the land.

Finally, Billy arrives at pattern. In his most recent paintings, the surface is stretched with linens of bold black and white patterns – some floral, some vaguely bovine. The sense of domesticity evoked by ornamentation sits in contrast to the masculine and virile iconography of golf, bulls and abstract painting. And yet saturated swaths of colour intersect the plane, in dynamic compositions that harken back to Billy’s Slants I (1980), and Slants II (2009-10) series. In some cases, the hard-edged abstraction is softened with the fuzzy texture of brightly coloured pastels that lay atop the surface of the painting. This comforting gesture buffers the high contrast that defines these works, offering the slightest tempering, and a tender hint of humility.

Return/Return brings Billy full-circle, from abstraction to representation and back again. Through layers of paint and forks in the road, Billy continues to explore his nuanced relationship to the picture plane, the signifiers within it, and the intricacy of its making.

J. McCarroll is a senior Canadian painter who has lived and worked in Lethbridge since 1971. He was an early member of the University of Lethbridge Fine Arts Department, and became Gallery Director of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery in 1972. Billy has exhibited widely across Canada and the US, and is represented by Jarvis Hall Gallery in Calgary. This exhibition is organized and supported by John Savill and Savill Group Architecture.