In the Galleries
A Fine Mess
Painter Wil Murray keeps it all under control By David Balzer
Art and anarchy: Murray's Birthday Party Shouting Shooting
With their dizzying use of colour and outrageous, guerrilla-like approach to montage and bricolage, Wil Murray’s paintings can rightly be called maximalist. They might also be called messes. Yet while the Calgary-born, Montreal-based artist’s technique depends on spontaneity and chance (the globs of paint he spills on his canvases are often left overnight to settle), there is considerable method to his madness. Each piece takes months to complete and employs a battalion of media—acrylics, glazes, insulating spray foam and glitter—which are then built up, occasionally so high they extend three to four inches off the canvas. Murray’s process also involves the constant reapplication of paint: sometimes he pours it on glass, peels it off and sticks it to his paintings; now and again he removes sections from a canvas, tacking them down on other works and filling their insides with foam. Inspired by writers like Flannery O’Connor, as well as the recent New New Painting movement, such elaborate acts suggest that art about chaos is, in fact, not all that chaotic—that it has its own internal logic and, ultimately, its own zany form of beauty.
Strawberry Alarmist Talk Radio. Artwork $1,500–$6,000. July 21 to Aug. 12. Loop Gallery, 1174 Queen St. W., 416-516-2581.
TEST Originally published July 2007
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