Christopher Friesen

“The fictions of ʻmasterʼ and ʻcopyʼ are now so entwined with each other that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends.”

- Douglas Davis, The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction, 1995

In this recent series of paintings Christopher Friesen uses iconic works by French master JeanBaptiste---CamilleCorot (1796 – 1875) to explore legacies of modern painting and to consider notions of influence, quotation, authorship, and the “real” in the age of digital reproduction.

Corot is remembered most for his landscape paintings. Highly influential, his late style is often considered a forerunner to Impressionism and there is little doubt of his profound influence on modern painting. Corot was prolific in his output, and his work has also been copied and forged perhaps more than any other artist in history. Friesen uses the preponderance of Corot’s imagery to engage with notions of visuality and questions of pictorial fidelity, particularly where these ideas intersect with the digital.

Rather than adhering to Corot’s work with close stylistic accuracy, Friesen chooses large-scale canvases, favours a loose application of paint and bold palette, and accentuates the flatness of the painting’s surface. Though he sets out to create a series that is remarkably dissimilar to Corot when experienced in person, Friesen has ensured that the resulting paintings bear enough of a resemblance to the originals that these distinctions are significantly curtailed when mediated through a digital device.

As the title of the exhibition suggests, algorithms used in online image searches are fundamental to Friesen’s larger project. The artist deliberately appropriates Corot’s original titles for his own works, thereby eliminating any hierarchy that exists online that would separate original from copy. A simple Google image search produces myriad and varied versions of paintings bearing these names. The innocent online researcher could easily be lost in a thicket of images within which no frame of reference for the “real” is apparent.

Friesen’s willing engagement with digital phenomena draws attention to the changing means through which works of art are reproduced, circulated, and consumed. At a time when we are just as likely to encounter a work of art online as in person, Friesen’s project asks what the nature of this encounter ought to be, and whether the future of art is in galleries or on screens.

Laura Schneider, Curator

Titled “Silvery Tones” these oil on canvas paintings are a contemporary look at the pre-impressionist painter Camille Corot.

Friesen became interested in Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot while visiting the Frick collection in New York for the first time. The piece that intrigued him was “The Lake”, a large scale landscape Corot painted in 1861. This period of Corot’s work resonates with how Friesen sees painting operating today, the traces of creation with an obvious brushstroke produced at essentially a human scale.

Friesen writes “I see this work as being produced in a transitional period where there are obvious impressionistic devices, such as vibrant flecks of paint applied to a style still rooted in the safety of tradition. The pictoral devices Corot uses allows abstract licks of paint to exist in a structured environment that push and pull our notions of what painting is and what painting has the potential to do. ‘Silvery Tones’ is an investigation into how we understand that process in a contemporary way.”

“A digital artifact is any undesired alteration in data introduced in a digital process by an involved technique and/or technology.”

This exhibition is a dialogue between the past and the present, with painting and printmaking conflating these two notions about what is a modern artifact.