Review - Elizabeth McIntosh at Blanket Gallery

Elizabeth McIntosh
Untitled (multi-coloured vertical stripes), (2008)
Oil on canvas
75" x 90"

Most painting aficionados in Vancouver are likely already familiar with the colourful geometric abstractions of Elizabeth McIntosh. For her trademark triangles, namely reproductions of those found in her painting Untitled (Purple, Red, Blue) (2006), served as the advertising for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s successful PAINT exhibition, also of 2006. Those triangles lurked conspicuously on city buses, magazine advertisements and lampposts across the Lower Mainland, sprouting up here and there, almost as though frantically multiplying in a Pythagorean orgy. Often they appeared in transit while traveling on the sides of buses, spreading the new look of geometric abstraction. Thus, overnight Elizabeth McIntosh’s triangles became the welcomed poster children for what the Georgia Straight titled the “rebirth” (or perhaps more realistically, reiteration) of painting on the West Coast.

Fast-forward to the present and McIntosh is having her second solo exhibition in Vancouver, once again at the downtown eastside Blanket Gallery. At mid career she remains fully committed to the three-sided planer form: her trademark triangles appear in every painting, twisting, turning, often almost convulsing under their own illusionistic weight. And they are always present. It is arguably this sustained focus (not to be mistaken for stasis) on triangulation that makes McIntosh’s paintings so surprisingly surprising.

The wonder herein resides not in the singular forms, but rather in the intricate geodesic topographies that are the imaginative sums of such. For instance, in Untitled (multi-coloured vertical stripes) (2008), coloured triangles of different tonal values combine to form what the title didactically insinuates. The stripes twist and buckle, snaking vertically up the picture plane only to be disrupted by negative triangular spaces that reveal silver and grey under-painting. Likewise in Untitled (2008), triangles team up to create a bulky landscape that defies all real world design logic: they playfully coalesce into an amalgamation of illusionistic space, a massive magical mountain. While the foreground magic certainly takes the pictorial precedent, the compositional complexity of McIntosh’s paintings runs much deeper.

Lingering behind this mountain construct, beneath thin washes of diluted paint, is another picture altogether. Revealed only in part through select triangles, it is never clear what precisely constitutes this secondary (though clearly once primary) pictorial plane. As is the case in Untitled (Yellow) (2008), where one finds hints of an underlying geometric superstructure that mysteriously aligns itself with the dominating prismatic entity. Shrouded in washes of opaque yellow, the rectangular form seems carefully cast off into space, demoted to a secondary, diminutive role to that of the foreground prism. Through this employment of a picture-beneath-a-picture, McIntosh creates a successful push/pull effect. As such, the viewer is simultaneously drawn inwards towards the concealed image, while being pushed outwards by the dominating prismatic structure.

Measuring at 75 x 90”, three of McIntosh’s larger canvasses embrace the Western painting world’s (seemingly masculine) preoccupation with size. In fact they dominate Blanket’s rather humble, single room, enveloping the viewer in her inventive alternate world. Somehow McIntosh manages to do this, very deliberately one assumes, minus the macho-bravado typically associated with such bigger-is-better painting mentality. The playfulness of both the forms and palette somehow disarm the seriousness generally inherent with such grandiose scale. This is not your typical geometric abstraction; after all, her paintings are presumably meant to be ironic, for they contradict the very domain they inhabit.

To be certain, McIntosh’s paintings are easily categorized into the arena of Geometric Abstraction. Yet, they do not conform to the stereotypical aesthetic framework associated with the genre. These works oppose the typically hard-edged, perversely clean aesthetic preferred by other geometric painters, such as Bridget Riley or Peter Halley. In this resistance resides the curiosity that makes McIntosh’s paintings so inviting: their imperfections. To the untrained eye, these insistent imperfections evoke a feeling of I-Could-Have-Done-That-ness, but to announce such is to miss the point altogether. This amateur looking zeal is satirical, perhaps even humorous. Is McIntosh taking a gentle poke at the history of North American abstract painting? Perhaps.

Either way, like Mary Heilmann and Tomma Abts before her, McIntosh is a painter’s painter. Her triangles operate as a means to accessing the continuing discourse surrounding abstract painting. They are playful, they are inviting, and as such, they invigorate a genre of painting with an increasingly rich lineage on the West Coast. Her paintings are about nothing more or less than painting itself.

It is understandable then that a purveying of Blanket’s single room will reveal that the past two years have been witness to little thematic change on McIntosh’s behalf. As such, McIntosh aligns herself with other contemporary painters, such as Cecilia Edefalk and Germaine Koh, who also revisit their thematic territory regularly - so often so, in fact, that it becomes questionable whether or not they ever even left. It is increasingly evident that this is an undeniable strength, for the thematic arena of painting as a subject unto itself is, as McIntosh has once again rigorously proven, unmistakably vast.