MELANIE ROCAN at Paul Petro Gallery (980 Queen West), to August 1. 416-979-7874. Rating: NNNN
Is it the strike that makes us see the poetry of waste and detritus everywhere? If we held a garbage-themed cultural festival, the first stop could be the wonderful paintings of Winnipeg-based emerging talent Mélanie Rocan at Paul Petro.
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Entangled masses of stuff – broken furniture, ribbons, scraps of floral-patterned wallpaper and textiles, wooden frames, chains, plant forms – star in many of Rocan’s haunting scenes.
In Weaving A Dress, a woman at the edge of the picture grapples with a huge snarl of chandeliers, chairs, candles and other ornamental whatnot. The woman wearing The Red Dress drags a house and various furnishings on her train, which morphs into a peninsula from which she looks out to sea.
Another agglomeration of canvas stretchers, house forms, ribbons, chains and textiles becomes a circus spectacle for a swirling multicoloured audience under the big top’s floating tent in The Painting Side Show. In Returning, youthful figures regularly arrayed to the horizon of a pink plain are bound together in a kind of fantastic folk dance by umbilicals of chain or ribbon.
Rocan’s work is a meditation not only on material excess and the beauty of decay but on women’s fraught connection to the decorative and the home and on the act of representational painting itself. Inconsistencies of scale contribute a surreal quality, and the artist skilfully resolves areas just this side of muddy into pleasantly hazy backgrounds and loosely applied brush strokes into recognizable forms.
Rocan imparts an off-kilter, disturbing feel to colourful, “pretty” imagery that’s reminiscent of the paintings of early 20th-century Belgian proto-surrealist painter James Ensor. While many young artists seem content to recycle kitsch and pop culture, she presents a complex, strikingly original painted world.
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