November 21- December 2, 2012
PROPELLER CENTRE FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
For every dweller in the city, and especially for Toronto artist Jean-Philippe Finkelstein, metropolitan experience is a cinema of discontinuous, fugitive events.
Shadows Serie 2012, 122 x 122 cm (Mixed media on Polyester film). Courtesy of Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts.
An ordinary wall is suddenly, briefly illuminated by a shaft of sunshine, then returned to darkness. A tree in the urban forest, struck by late afternoon light in a certain way, becomes prismatic, a spangle of uncommon hues and patterns against the sky. In the bustle of traffic on sidewalks and streets, as well as one the walls of big-city museums, colours and shapes collide, creating small, intense abstract incidents that linger in the mind as pungent memories. These and similar episodes–or at least their abrupt importance, their sensuous power–cannot be put into words very easily (if at all), but their emotional meanings can certainly be recalled in art.
Shadows Serie 2012, 122 x 122 cm (Mixed media on Polyester film). Courtesy of Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts.
This recollection of the ephemeral is the task Finkelstein has set for himself in his recent paintings on paper. He conjures with his memories, making symbolic pictures intended to invoke what he has glimpsed–not the literal appearance of it, of course, but rather its sensuous impact on his mind and soul. The elements used for stencilling these icons register, by way of metonymy, the forces at play in the theatre of the city that Finkelstein beholds: Mass-produced punched fibreboard stands in here for the mechanical repetitions and standardized structures that form the hard foundation of urban experience, and elaborate arabesques represent our fluid states of consciousness and even our erotic, idiosyncratic bodies, joining, separating, entwining. The very act of stencilling these templates on to paper is an echo of the continual inscription of sensations and ideas and conflicting desires on our flesh by the great churn of city life.
Shadows Serie 2012, 122 x 122 cm ( Oil paint on mdf panel). Courtesy of Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts.
Shadows Serie 2012, 244 x 244 cm (Mixed media on Polyester film). Courtesy of Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts.
Finkelstein’s practice of urban reverie is rooted in the radically important French avant-garde creative tradition, more literary than pictorial, that begins with Baudelaire’s prose poems and continues through the Symbolist poets and Proust. From the earlier artists in this lineage, he has learned how to stand both inside and outside the metropolitan phenomena that interest him; and he has learned to expect epiphanies from occurrences that most of us consider too banal or commonplace to notice. Finkelstein’s contribution to this Parisian legacy consists in his translation of its insights into an unusual visual medium that seeks to put flesh on spiritual and carnal apprehensions, that visibly embodies the evanescent, that figures-forth in art remembrances of things past.
Shadows Serie 2012, 122 x 122 cm (Mixed media on Polyester film). Courtesy of Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts.
John Bentley Mays, October 2012