Michael Smith: Illusion Horizon

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Michael Smith, "Montréal Studio," 2019

Opening: Saturday, September 7, 2019 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.TrépanierBaer is delighted to present Michael Smith’s Illusion Horizon, an exhibition of the artist’s most recent paintings. Anchoring the exhibition will be the epic Le Passage, a massive work of memory, reflection, and imagination representing Smith’s transatlantic journey from England to Canada in 1978. Several large-scale tondos will accompany Le Passage in the Main gallery.  His latest small-scale Compass Series and a suite of studies for the Le Passage, including source material, will be presented in the Promenade gallery.   

A landscape for Michael Smith is a world and a whirled. He recognizes that all his references are to landscape and he is obsessed with those possibilities. There is no single way for his landscapes to be viewed or rendered and, as a result, the process of their realization is neither stable nor predictable. In Smith’s hands, a landscape is a repository for memory (the past) and a site for making (the present). At their core, they hold emotion, psychology and aesthetics in an inexplicable balance. - Robert Enright, Border Crossings

Michael Smith in Conversation with Nancy Tousley at 1:30 p.m

TrépanierBaer is pleased to announce that Michael Smith will be joined by award-winning senior art critic, arts journalist and independent curator Nancy Tousley at the opening of Michael Smith: Illusion Horizon. Together, artist and curator will examine and survey the paintings on view and their respective contexts.

Nancy Tousley has previously written about Michael Smith's work, and she has poignantly described aspects of the composition of his paintings:

The clear visual clues are to landscapes or seascapes, sometimes it's difficult to tell which, but the images just hang onto the edge of representation. Everything on the surface seems fluid, full of movement, ready to change and stilled for only a moment, recalling the way that a photograph captures an instant from a temporal flow.

Op. Cit., Nancy Tousley, "Painter Michael Smith Captures Feeling of Nature," Calgary Herald, Sunday May 6, 2006

This dialogue is not to be missed!