ROBERT VANDERHORST with music by NASH THE SLASH at the Royal Ontario Museum (100 Queen’s Park), Friday (June 10), 7 pm (free tickets from 4:30 pm). 416-586-5549, www.twoartists.ca. Rating: NNN
Rating: NNN
Imagine a painter with an eye like Vermeer’s and a drug-addled brain like Dali’s. Now add an accompanist wrapped in bandages and you have View From The Gallery.
The second instalment of the collaboration between Robert Vanderhorst and Nash the Slash – the first unfolded at St. Lawrence Hall last week – features 14 new paintings and an electric violin score by the 80s music icon.
It might sound strange, but the sweeping electric crescendos complement and bring new life to Vanderhorst’s oil paintings, photo-realistic treatments of surrealist imagery.
The paintings are a kind of Where’s Waldo game of spotting recurrent key figures: a quizzical cat leaning on your left, ostriches abandoned in the snow or the B-25 jet hidden in every frame. As in a dream, they force us to make meaning from scattered images as we sift through the various worlds on the canvas.
Coupled with a guy dressed like a mummy playing electric violin, the show’s a winner.
