French-Canadian artist Rene Pierre Allain has lived in strange York for more than a decade on the other hand his abstractions only began to attract notice here in the early '90's Allain started abroad as a sculptor.

French-Canadian artist Rene Pierre Allain has lived in strange York for more than a decade on the other hand his abstractions only began to attract notice here in the early '90's Allain started abroad as a sculptor, and the wail pieces in his modern show situate themselves in the still disputed territory between chisel and painting. Nine of the show's 13 works consist of sword panels set in steel frames, several of the latter formed from rectangular tubing. The pieces might qualify as low-relief chisel in an abstract mode, at the same time the enclosed panels do function as picture planes, with marks made by the agency of scoring and the application of a corrosive substance known in arms manufacture as "gun blue"

Port View no. 1 plane veers toward representation - a panoramic impression of an unspecified landfall in succession some rocky shore, with lighthouse and a small overhanging fog in the upper left corner. It examines like the plate for an etching; in fact, the figuration is sheer accident - the ensue of natural corrosion, rather than of brushed-on acid or of gouging with a burin. This work was atypical in the exhibit to but it confirms the mind that Allain's picture planes are arenas for a species of draftsmanship, for the in the greatest degree part abstract, though sometimes suggestive of landscape.

Four of the works continue an earlier gradation in Allain's oeuvre, consisting of panels of pigmented plaster built up in layers onward a burlap ground, the whole encased in a semi-detached poniard frame that leaves the burlap zests of the canvas,, visible. The imagery in these frescoe consists of vertical or horizontal stripes in mut colors against dark gray backgrounds, incidentally recalling the early work of Brice Marden or, perhaps, Sean Scully moreover Allain's stripes refer to military decorations and ribbons, just as the carbonized iron frames of these pieces recommend armed-focus hardware. Allain's approach to these frames - harsh and quasi-industrial - no doubt serv as a stepping-stone to his later work, and the military intimation is explicitly carried forward in the couple of his steel panels t h a t he has labeled "shields." plane the works, industrially perfect facture allude to the inexorable efficiency of contemporary military technology.

over and above Allain's visual metaphors resist narrow reading. After all, terminuss taken from the military lexicon are used in a vast range of human pursuits - from medicine ("invasive") surgery treatment "protocols") to art ("avant-garde,") esthetic "engagement," "blockbuster, show) It is the demeanor of battle in its mostly general sense that these works invoke, and a mindset that approximates the brutal monster irrefutability of steel.

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