Many years ago, when I was a graduate student in the States, I had an ailment that required treatment once a week in a large university hospital. The lounge in which I waited to see the doctor was no more interesting or luxurious than such institutional places usually are – except for one thing: a painting of a deep cove on the rocky Cornish coast. The canvas hung behind the clinic's reception desk, where anyone checking in couldn't miss it.
The picture wasn't by a famous artist, and didn't depict a famous scene. It wasn't avant-garde or challenging in style, and its subject matter was picturesque and quite conventional. It was a landscape of the uncontroversial, realistic sort one customarily encounters in hospital waiting rooms, dentists' offices, hotel rooms, tower lobbies, condo corridors and other public or common areas. You don't expect to have your socks knocked off by an artwork in such environments, and they rarely are.
Despite the painting's sedate topic, however, I found myself looking forward to seeing it each week. The colours were strong, fresh and clear, the brushwork was vigorous and the composition was energetic, if hardly "radical." The picture invited us simply to smell the salty sea air, feel the dramatic weather, hear the waves crashing on the cliffs at the mouth of the cove, sense the calm within it. And, in the opinion of this outpatient, the canvas worked. It wasn't great art. It wasn't a masterpiece in the seashore genre. But while not overstepping the bounds of what "hospital art" has to be, it gave pleasure I have not forgotten,
Such memorable pleasure is all we can reasonably ask of art in institutional settings. Which isn't to say that's the only thing we ever get. Toronto's tower developers occasionally surprise art-savvy observers by purchasing or commissioning genuinely important pieces by Canadian and international artists for lobbies and passage-ways and more public venues.
This is not, however, what Toronto's Menkes Developments has done with its $150,000 art program at Pears on the Avenue, a new, 20-storey upmarket condominium block just north of the corner of Avenue Road and Davenport Road.
In a statement, developer Jared Menkes explains what has motivated the gathering and installation of the art. His family firm "has always incorporated art into our condominium projects, because we believe that residents don't just take pride in their individual units, but also in the common areas and amenity spaces – and they appreciate the added character and dimension that comes from quality art. With Pears on the Avenue, we were excited to be able to assemble a collection of original Canadian art that was a balance between emerging and established artists."
The job of assembly has been carried out by consultant Grace Zeppilli, who worked closely with interior designer Alessandro Munge on the selection and placement of the (by my count) 19 sculptures, large-format photographs, prints, paintings and mixed-media works. These pieces have been put into the lobby, on the walls of a second-floor corridor that runs alongside the gym and in the guest suite, a party room and a boardroom.
I've never seen a more spiritless or more stale group of artworks in the common areas of a residential high rise.
Vancouver photographer Norman Stelfox's giclee prints, in the lobby, are at least bouncily colourful – although all the credit for vivacity should properly go to American glass artist Dale Chihuly, whose sinuous sculptures they depict and riff on. Whatever excitement they have is second-hand, merely the leftover decor from somebody else's party. Of course, even an excellent source can't guarantee that an artist's take on it will be effective. There is no American terrain visually richer than the desert, for example, so one can only marvel at the banality of Peter Andrews' three images of it here. But banality is what characterizes the collection as a whole.
Ms. Zeppilli had to work hard to find art this dull and forgettable. Toronto, to name only the Canadian scene closest to home, is full of affordable sculptures, paintings, prints and photographs that are as good as, and often far better than, the canvas I admired in a hospital waiting-room long ago. Nobody's talking about anything quirky or wild – just art that deserves and rewards the passerby's attention. Residents and their guests may glance at the art in the rooms and corridors of Pears on the Avenue, but they'll never take a second look.