What's Required
Natalie Olanick and Richard Storms
Painting
Main Gallery

Toronto Artist
Publication: What's Required: Interview with Natalie Olanick and Richard Storms

Not boring at all

Oliver Girling
Eye Weekly, April 1994

It's like a jungle sometimes or desert, or quagmire, or toxic heap, or minefield, or soupy carpet -- take your pick or bring your own metaphor. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under.

I'm talking about the galleries this season. lt's not that you have to duck bullets or jump to avoid getting blown up or are forced to dodge the burning torch from an inspired flame-thrower. That might be exciting. The mortal danger to the viewer is of being bored to death -- stunned, stultified, petrified, ossified, jellied it aspic. Did tedium become the flavor of the month and I was having too much fun to notice. Did the ghost of Don Judd rise from his recently dug grave and proclaim: "And Less shall reign forever and ever, amen"?

It's not just the kitsch nouveau paintings -- swishy brushwork laid over photographically tight renderings. It's the Concept and neo-Fluxus shuff that hasn't had the glimmer of an idea since '68. It's the Inclusive group shows that any artist can enter if they promise they're not WASP -- even if the used to he. (Spare a thought, while we're on the subject, for "WASP" Jeanne Cannizzo, the antropologist who was run out of the country last year by the worthies at the University of Toronto for daring to make an exhibition that crossed somebody's Party line.)

There's an oasis sometimes, and I found two recently -- at Mercer Union and The Red Head. Three of thc artists are (relative) newcomers the fourth a veteran. Now steady on, Girling. The last time I rhapsodized over a debut, albeit in the dying days of the show, the shy fell -- first The Globe and Mail then the morality squad and finally legions of outraged Canadians, who'd never heard of the gallery much less seen the artist's work, raised their voices in a holler of self-righteous opprobrium, and we had the Eli Langer affair. (It may be that just the targets have changed in Toronto from the dirty 30s when Hanlan's Point posted signs saying - "No dogs or Jews"; now it might read "No artists or anthropologists.")

Nattalie Olanick is showing at Mercer Union with Richard Storms in What's Required is a vetern of the commercial scene and Olanick is beginning to show regularly. This is a great pairing; they could take the tag Kid 'N Play because that's the spirit they work in.

Storms is a fine technicial painter whose work got really interesting when he began to play with numbers, alphabets ans related sign-systems in the pictures. This time it's mostly maps, not the look, but fragments excerpted from them. In the two large canvases, South Of Dallas and Heart Of Texas, it's the numerical distances, the mileages, but stripped from the highways that provide context. A smaller pair depict highways linking a couple of lakes, which, stripped of context, resemble a diagram of nerve synapses. Sussex Drive after a painting operation becomes Sex Drive. and all are painted in bouyant oil colours.

The double view, visual punning between print conventions (such as the map) and biological diagrams, that can be seen in Storms' work is also featured in that of Olanick. This is the most complete and satisfying group of paintings by the artist I've seen yet. Three four by four foot canvases are called Spinning Plates. Painted in a form of encaustic (wax-based paint), they're whimsical, delightful and carnival-esque. They split form and content between heavily painted areas and bits embedded in wax that are stippled and scratched. This is especially evident in a smaller, four paneled piece, Supercoiled DNA. This isn't the ultra self-conciousness of nouveau kitch, but a natural schism between the drawing and painting impulses.