Ed Pien's untitled work, above, was created through a multilayered process of drawing, projecting and cutting.
Ed Pien at Libralato Gallery
$3,200-$6,800. Until March 20, 129 Tecumseth St., Toronto; 416-365-3003, www.birchlibralato.com
Chinese paper cutting or Jian Zhi, the intricate art in which thin sheets of paper are snipped by knife or scissors into astoundingly complex designs, is nearly as old as paper-making itself (which originated during the Han Dynasty thousands of years ago). Given their decorative nature, the paper-cuts were often hung up against the light and referred to as "chuang hua" - "window flower."
Taiwan-born artist Ed Pien grew up with the tradition of paper-cutting. "But I never really looked very carefully at it until I made my first trip to China in 2004," he tells me, on the phone from his Toronto studio. "For me," he says, "paper-cutting is beautiful but highly conventional. What I wanted to do was to find ways of integrating the ancient paper-cutting process with other aspects of my work." (Pien's work involves watery, layered drawings, delicate but architecturally-scaled installation works, video, and other modes of intimate theatricality).
For his exhibition, Vanishing, now at Toronto's Birch Libralato Gallery, Pien has expanded the traditional paper-cutting process with a vengeance, producing this suite of large (32" x 47 1/4") hand-cut digital prints which are mounted in shadow-box-like frames and incorporate into their two-dimensional ornateness an atmospherically intense sense of depth - and, therefore, drama.
The process of making the works is as layered as the works themselves. Pien makes drawings (freely using the computer to do so), prints the drawings onto acetate sheets, projects the acetates, using an overhead projector, onto sheets of paper mounted on a large board on his studio wall, and then proceeds to cut away the paper - working intuitively as if he were simply drawing - leaving behind the tableau he wants.
By employing Photoshop, Pien can confound the genuine shadows his cutouts will naturally throw against the back of their shadowbox with the additional shadows and shadings he generates by computer. The result is a paper-cut that seems to have left behind its conventionally decorative pattern-making to strike out on its own. The effect approaches the immersive, involving experiences of theatre and film.
Pien's pictures teem with implied narrative. In the untitled work shown here, the silhouette of a male figure, lodged high in an entangling tree, appears to hold the silhouette of a female figure firmly enough that her feet don't even touch down on a limb. Is he keeping her safe from something (the scene keeps suggesting King Kong to me)? Is she even real? (Pien suggests, wickedly, that she might be just an inflated doll).
Other pictures in the series feature other people in treetops, curiously and provocatively placed (the works bear slightly sinister titles like The Prey, Tempest and The Reckoning). "They are full of mystery," says Pien of his paper-cut narratives. "I like to try to create tension in the pictures, and I welcome speculation on the part of the viewer about their meaning. There has to be mystery there," he adds, "because any lack of tension is just too sweet for me."
Tim Zuck at Barbara Edwards Contemporary
$2,700-$17,000. Until May 1, 1069 Bathurst St., Toronto; 647-348-5110, www.becontemporary.com
I've never been able to warm much to the careful - for me, all too careful - drawings and paintings by this much-heralded and clearly virtuoso artist, whose work is so tantalizingly poised between realism and abstraction.
But if any body of his work were to break down my long-standing resistance, this small but delectable exhibition of paintings and charcoal drawings - his first solo exhibition at the recently established Barbara Edwards Contemporary - might do the trick. Here, Zuck does something he does very well indeed: He takes a simple (or apparently simple) shape - a chevron-shaped configuration or a baseball-diamond-like shape or an elemental house-shape - and lovingly and deftly grinds so much powdery charcoal into it, that it comes off looking like some ineffable, indissoluble, eternal sign - a primal shape with power.
This is one of the things Zuck does so well: to begin with an almost banality and then to lavish so much care on his chosen, over-familiar image that it is eventually transformed into something rich and suddenly unknowable. You thought you knew, for example, what a house looked like. And then suddenly (Zuck's deep, burnished charcoal is like anentryway to a richer, more interior understanding) you don't. What you get instead is "house-ness." Which is way different.
Malcolm Rains at Nicholas Metivier Gallery
Prices on request. Until March 20, 451 King St. W., Toronto; 416-205-9000, www.metiviergallery.com
I don't understand this exhibition. Rains calls it The Olympus Series - and then proceeds, as his artist's statement puts it, to "explore the evocative potential and physical presence of paint" by employing "fields of colour and painterly marks" which are supposed to have taken on "an heroic presence" which is further supposed to evoke "the drama of ancient Greek mythology."Unfortunately, the paintings, which are made mostly by scraping pigment across the canvases, look like those of German superstar painter Gerhardt Richter - except on a punier scale - and they don't evoke anything except themselves (and certainly not the sonorities of Greek mythology). "The Olympus paintings," intones the gallery, "are chimerical allegories of the legends of the gods." If they really are, I'll eat one.