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Art Art & Books

Blurred visions

STEPHEN ANDREWS at Paul Petro Contemporary (980 Queen West), to March 26. 416-979-7874. See listing. Rating: NNNN


Stephen Andrews takes technologically generated images through several permutations in this elegant series of lithographs and paintings that riffs on crowd scenes in Toronto.

This isn’t the first time Andrews’s imagery has taken the degraded or blurred mechanical image as a starting point. Facsimile, his series of portraits of HIV/AIDS victims, was based on faxed photographic memorials. The Quick And The Dead, about the Iraq War, used grainy video stills from the conflict.

This show, Un Pequeno Parte De Algo Mas Grande, isn’t overtly political, but the recorded images are at first glance barely intelligible. Eventually, as figures begin to emerge from the blurred abstractions, adding another layer of visual density and interest, you realize you’re seeing some kind of visually distorted field.

Three paintings resemble the tightly woven, out-of-focus digital pattern of a large LED screen at a concert, while four lithographs appear to be gradual reductions of a photographic image to simpler and simpler elements, taking the viewer into the fuzzy terrain between the representational and the abstract.

One tiny painting between two windows consists of four circles in cyan, magenta, yellow and black, a discreet reference to the printed half-tone rasters that make up images in the four-colour photographic process. It, too, is a reduction of the photographic image to its most basic elements, a reminder that photography is only one method of visual rendering.

Andrews’s juxtaposition of high-tech and painterly ways of seeing is less about opposition than it is about finding pleasing resonances. There’s something serenely meditative about the way he delves into the blurry and confounding territory between visual perception, painting and the mechanical image.

He’s not so much aggressively deconstructing the process of vision as he is putting us more intimately in touch with it.

art@nowtoronto.com

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