As above, so below
This exhibition is about personal reflections when in nature, a contemplative space where your thoughts are elevated. These paintings are at the core fundamental challenges in my own practice both technically, as in the formal arrangements of elements and application, and buildup of marks, as well as the contemplative space that creating and looking at a painting allows to happen. In this painting exhibition, I am exploring the idea of the sublime landscape. The landscape is a subject that continues to evolve for me as it can be a conduit for multiple purposes and meanings. Landscape is a subject that I can explore with painting as well as a subject that can transcend its material construction to give us a glimpse into our position in the world.
I seek these natural spaces out when travelling and going on hikes or outings. I know that somehow, I need these moments in my life, that these reflections are intrinsic to what it means for me to be human. I see this kind of searching in others that gravitate towards a vantage point or trying to get a better look at a moment that is truly in the here and now. These sublime experiences in nature are important. In this fast-paced and ever-changing world this reminds me to slow down and take it in, to reflect on our place in the world. For me that is one thing that painting continues to offer us. Paintings are complete and complex. Paintings are stable and continue to reassure us that the world still holds mystery and moments worth exploring. We can stand where others have stood but the journey to get there is uniquely our own.
Christopher Friesen
2023
My work is not planned out to the degree that I know what it will look like when it is finished. I go into the studio with an idea, a concept, and an image to reference. For me, painting needs to be a mark and response: it needs to be a dialogue between the artist and materials. The paint should be the conversation. It should be the vehicle that delivers the meaning. I think that this is ultimately why painting holds such importance in my practice. Paint is a conduit that helps me understand the world around me. The act of painting slows me down and allows me to contemplate, to give my thoughts time. I learn so much every time I paint, every time I look at painting. When I am in front of a painting, I am looking for that balance, that moment that can only makes sense with paint, the moment that can only be understood with the patience and risk it takes to make a painting.
Christopher Friesen 2023
“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.”
At the Elissa Cristall Gallery in Vancouver in October 2012.
“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.
