KIM DORLAND at Angell Gallery (12 Ossington), to February 19. 416-530-0444. See listing. Rating: NNN
It’s been four years since Kim Dorland won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition for his brutally thick impasto landscapes that drew heavily on his rural Alberta youth.
Dorland’s new work at Angell is even darker and has taken a distinctively psychological turn. The searing oranges and pinks have given way to thick blacks, greys and pale phosphorescent greens. His gritty rural adolescent vibe has morphed into more ooky-spooky fare in a midnight forest furtively alive with spectral creatures, skeletal trees and shadowy forms.
In the show’s central painting, The Girl Disappears, a female figure, floating between two ghostly trees and dissolving into phosphorescent blobs, radiates a palpable, low-budget-horror unease without being exactly clear: is this an epiphany or a horrible supernatural death?
The eeriness continues in a room of glow-in-the-dark paintings, Dorland’s earnest bid to make work that can be viewed in two different kinds of light. The results are mixed, though Tree, a knotted trunk against a glowing sky, shows that he still has solid drawing instincts. His untitled skeletal drawing of a girl, in which he seems to be channelling morbid existential angst directly from Edvard Munch, is also truer to his tough painterly form.
He’s also laughing through some of it. His antagonistic relationship to traditional Canadian landscape painting resurfaces in the tongue-in-cheek figure of Tom Thomson leering as a ghoul and a decayed skull in three paintings, appearing to be one more ghost in a growing collection of spectres Dorland wants to exorcise.
Yet his most successful work still takes place in something closer to daylight. Tree House, with its stunning cobalt blue sky, is the strongest painting in the show and the one least preoccupied with things that go bump in the mind’s dark forest.
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