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SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 2000
VISUAL ARTS
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Seizing moments from time’s flux
GALLERY GOING [by] GARY MICHAEL DAULT
Philip Iverson at the Lonsdale Gallery
The paintings of Fredericton-based artist Philip Iverson take a few seconds
to kick in, but when they do, they grab you hard. If you like the wild,
gestural thing in painting — and I do (and always have) —
then Iverson is your man. One of them, anyhow. What won me over about
his work, however, was not the flailing madness of his attack (apparently
he puts on music and bobs, weaves, prances, floats like a butterfly and
stings like a bee while he slathers on the pigment). It was the fact that,
if you can stay with it long enough, you begin to see the emergence of
the images that give the paintings their real meaning. Things come and
go. Sometimes there are lakes, stands of pine forest, wooded hills, clouds.
In the dizzying One Foot In/One Foot Out (a work on paper that is about
2½ by four metres of calculated lunacy), a searing hot comet thunders
toward the moon, while in the foreground, floating in dark space, a wall-size
Earth writhes with life — faces wobble forward like wraiths, flowers
bloom in the wreckage of a teeming, close-packed civilization, and there
are disembodied legs, one of which hangs out into space as if someone
is pumping the planet along, the way you would a Scooter. Sometimes some
of the little landscapes (Moist Afternoon, for example) go flat. But when
Iverson is hot — as in, say, the ravishing Crane and the more-or-less
perfect Day/Night — he’s very hot in deed.
$750-$10,000.
Until April 15. 410 Spadina Rd., Toronto.
416-487-8733.
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