“Velvet Morning Light”
paintings, sculptures and needlepoint by Les Ramsay
May 25 to June 15, 2024
Robert Kardosh Gallery (formerly Marion Scott Gallery)
2423 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC
open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 6pm
Update: since making this video, the artist has now relocated back to Vancouver.
Drawing inspiration from domestic craft, textiles, folk art, and digital imagery, Ramsay’s work explores themes of memory, nostalgia, and the passage of time. His layered, multimedia compositions often feature large oil paintings, fabric assemblages, sculpture, and framed needlepoint, inviting viewers to contemplate the complex interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Central to Ramsay’s practice is his innovative use of recycled everyday domestic objects, which he manipulates through both constructive and deconstructive techniques. He breathes new life into discarded materials, transforming them into thought-provoking works of art that challenge perceptions of beauty and utility.
The exhibition features a new series of small paintings on burlap and a kind of heavily textured material used in commercial upholstery. Partly landscapes and partly explorations in abstract form and colour, these works share certain formal similarities with each other, such as the presence of horizontal bands intersected by vertical and semi-vertical motifs. These repeating compositional patterns and structures give the series unity and cohesion. Some of the paintings make playful references to folk art, incorporating small houses in gridded fields, fences and the occasional colourful car. Others feature different motifs, including flowers, trees and, in one instance, a road with a dotted white line disappearing over a distant horizon. In keeping with his pattern-making tendencies, these modestly scaled paintings make extensive use of silhouetted forms layered on grounds of contrasting colour. Even when the forms within these images are recognizable, ambiguity is always present as a generative factor, giving Ramsay’s small, evocatively coloured images their fascination and depth.
Despite the playfulness and whimsy that is inherent in Ramsay’s expression, the artist is often aware of the presence of less benign, even at times sinister, elements within his images. Some of the silhouettes, for example, contain a multiplicity of forms whose transformative potential is itself menacing and unsettling, imbuing the loosely rendered images with a moodiness that is at odds with their joyful surface and sensuous colours. Similarly, the ambiguity that is a feature of so many of Ramsay’s compositions gives them a potentially dark dimension by playing on our fears of the unknown.
For the last several years, Ramsay has augmented his painting practice with works produced in needlepoint, upending and blurring traditional distinctions between craft and high art. Many of these smaller, labour-intensive pieces are based on the artist’s existing paintings. In these works, Ramsay is investigating the visual process of translating an image from one medium into another, and from one scale to another, using unconventional substrates drawn from outside the historical realms of fine art.
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marionscottgal...
16 окт 2024
