NICOLAS BAIER at Gallery TPW (80 Spadina) to November 17. 416-504-4242. Rating: NNNN
fast-breaking montreal-based artist and furniture maker Nicolas Baier doesn’t look to photography to capture perfect images on film. For this art school dropout, the medium is more a means of exploring and manipulating space. His digitally tweaked, 2-metre-square cubist renderings of domestic interiors — his own — were the hit of the 2000 Biennale de Montréal, where he showed alongside heavyweights like AA Bronson, Michael Snow and Geneviève Cadieux, and Quebec museums have been snapping up his work ever since.
Some of that work is in this show — grids that show his studio workbench, a wall of book and CD cases, his messy bedroom — but in his newest works Baier frees his images from the rigid square, instead arranging a series of small images (like lit stove burners) shot on a mid-range digital camera (until now he’s used large-format, 4×5 negatives) on a brightly lit wall.
Meaning is secondary. Intuition is everything.
