ANDY DECOLA at Neubacher Shor Contemporary (5 Brock), to October 5. 416-546-3683. Rating: NNNN
Organic unity doesn’t seem to be a concern for young Toronto painters. Andy DeCola’s surreal pop sensibility is one example. His surfaces hit the eye with a cheerful wallop, but unresolved tensions are churning away inside them.
DeCola has already shown his gift for creating fields of immense visual pleasure, layering scanned bits of advertising and other mass media onto his canvases in his trademark ice-cream pastels. His bold juxtapositions and abstractions generally work well with his eye-popping palette.
This new series shares the same elements. Scanned images from surfing, travel and fashion magazines are seemingly applied to surfaces with the same bold colour sense and hallucinatory flatness. A new fascination with mirror images and kaleidoscopic symmetry, however, has overtaken this work, along with some darker, murkier shades. The results are more meditative and staid.
Even so, his paintings refuse to stay put. In Ceremony, a large abstracted floral pattern, the “petals” in the background threaten to overwhelm the foreground’s wallpaper pattern, creating an eerie digital flatness. The shifting elements hold together, but barely.
In Mountains Beyond Mountains the same kind of reconstituted imagery churns into something surreally new. A stack of hats sampled from a fashion magazine is elongated into a branch-like form connected to another shape made of bold fabric patterns. These converge over a grey mountain range digitally manipulated into almost unreadable abstraction. It’s at once visually pleasing, maddening and impossible to place.
Is it pop? Is it abstract? Is he quoting Jeff Koons, Neo Rauch or Sigmar Polke? It’s all these things and none of them. While mining the visual grammar of painting over the last 30 years, DeCola forges his own vocabulary.
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