MARIAN BANTJES at Onsite @ OCADU (100 McCaul), to June 5. 416-977-6000. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Typography and lettering fans shouldn’t miss Marian Bantjes’s show.
The BC-based graphic artist, who started out as a book designer, decided to put aside the client-centred priorities of commercial art in favour of a more personal approach. Using materials in new ways or subverting ornate Victorian decorative styles, she’s now in great demand worldwide for her eccentric book and magazine covers, posters and textile and wallpaper patterns.
She recently published I Wonder (also the show title), a medieval man-uscript-like book combining text and illumination, a wild trip through the vocabulary of ornament that includes alphabets, intricate gold leaf patterns and brocade-like borders made of pasta.
Bantjes shines brightest when working with lettering. Don’t look for originality in the language it might be too much to ask for literary abilities from such a prodigious visual talent. How, not what, she writes is everything.
Multicoloured text that recalls a crazy quilt or the painting of Paul Klee describes the artist’s mother, while pencil-drawn words loop around axles and gears for her mechanic father. A poem about a dentist is written on an array of drawn teeth. An alphabet on coloured-pencil drawings of wine grapes becomes a block of text for a wine poster.
Red and black letters intermix in what appears to be nonsense but when read one colour at a time turns out to be a letter to a garden-destroying deer. Photographs preserve her experiments with materials: “I want it all” spelled out in flower petals, or piles of sugar pushed into words and flourishes.
It’s hard to resist Bantjes’s Valentine’s cards, an annual undertaking that’s involved a unique heart drawn for each of her friends, generic “love letter” fragments (blocks of text written in exquisite calligraphic script) and repurposed Christmas cards laser-cut into heart-shaped doilies.
This inventive and charming graphic work is a visual feast.
art@nowtoronto.com
