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Harold Klunder Exhibition
By John Grande
Gallery Going
Vie Des Arts
No 189, Hiver 2002-2003
Le Cicuit
Atelier Circlaire
November 20th- December, 2002
Harold Klunder has talked of how light comes through from underneath his series of 12 aquatints, simply titled the individual months of the year created at Studio PM in 2002. The suggestion is that the process is somewhat organic, as if there were a light source emanating from somewhere under the ink and the paper's surface itself were the source of the light. We can see what looks like architectural forms, outlines of windows, even African motifs, and an overall art brut restlessness in these sensitive printworks created at Studio PM in Montreal. And there is the ever present in meandering line...
These inner environments are unconscious realizations, invented by the artist's soul. In Silence, an abstract woodcut from Allen Flint's studio in Hamilton, Ontario, the colours resonate with life, just as they do in the world. It is in this infinity of abstract representation, where the symbols of a mercurial ever transforming world with its atmospheres of chance remain less defined that we find these works at their strongest. Sublime reflections on the ever present fragility of human experience, Harold Klunder's printworks capture these, and other universal feelings. Visually, these prints build an effect like ripples, or a window we look into.
No reflection or gesture is ultimately spontaneous, more a musical intonation, where there is just an immeasurable moment of expression. Occasionally we see traces if Jackson Pollock's drips, and there are forms that float in space. The lines can be thick and painterly, or shift from a lighter shade of pale, to a darker textural drift. They establish a counterpoint, these impromptu reckonings, where each visual sensation is a fragment of the whole. These fleeting impulses or forms cannot ultimately be captured in their entirety by words. What they communicate is the actuality of life. Can any symbols adequately represent all of this or that, an organic overflow, as life spills its way ever so gradually, along the stairs, descending into death. The whole process amorphizes, and the art condenses sound, taste, smell, sensation...
The physical resonance and metaphysical intuition awaken us to the immediate sensation, which is in the image is the image. Each one varies and urges us, as if these works formed a cycle of life, towards some mythical universe or ancient place where the memories we carry are all there is. This place, this vision, can often lie buried beneath our consciousness, so busy have we become with the day to day. The physical object, the skin of things, this impasto that we call reality has, for a time, been supplanted by a dematerialization process born of a screen-bred imagery. The image now exists as a physico-perceptual entity, more than a reality.
Harold Kluder's recent aquatint and woodcut works on view at the Atelier Circulaire's new premises awaken our sense of the tactile universe, of that silence in the garden of imagination we experience as children. In one brief instant the extravaganza unfolds, or dissolves...
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