September 2009
La Petite Mort Gallery presents…
JAMES HUCTWITH: New Paintings
Knock Yourself Out
or
An Orgy Of Divergent Errors
One Month Exhibit / September 4 – 27, 2009
Vernissage Friday Sept 4 / 7 – 10pm
Tunes by Big Mac Daddy
Proudly sponsored by CKCU 93.1 FM
Statement:
I’m inefficient. Awfully so.
I’d like to think that this would be more acceptable in any previous human age, than our current technological one. With oil painting as my vocation, I’d like to think I’d do better in the recent past, when the Fine Arts had a more prominent and persuasive place in society. Then I think of having to officially represent the state with my work to survive, the multiple indignities that go with inferior hygiene, bad dentistry and such, and I feel a tad better. Still, I feel somewhat marooned in the computer age – the age of pervasive, coercive, machine-driven efficiencies, an age of marketable and soothing intractable solutions. Like a lot of people, I’ve somehow ended up not trusting the mercenary flash of the things that surround us anymore, but can’t comfortably imagine inhabiting the future or the past.
The slavish or imperial past, the frightening inhuman scale of the future.
Classical realistic art – That is the art I was first and most deeply influenced by as a child. My later education had a lot of art history in it, but was inevitably, rambunctiously modern – heavy in theory, conceptualism and refusals. By then it was too late, though. Like the baby ducks reflexively following the vacuum cleaner they’ve initially mistaken for their mother, my course was set. I’d become an inadvertent realist.
Up until a few years back, I had landed a formula for working out a painting which suited me fairly well, one which looked pretty reassuringly Classical and Important. Except that by the time I had become at ease with painting this way, I’d also become deeply suspicious of it – and unhappy with its limitations. I looked around and realized that the world had moved on. There was nothing quaint about now. In the age of retroviral therapies and the atom bomb, I was using a computer to help me put together an imitation of pieces that had been painted by the light of tallow candles, The things I wanted to depict had become complicated, obscure, outsize, and difficult as well. They didn’t fit into a neat realistic box or scenario anymore.
I wasn’t having fun.
When goodness and propriety are getting one boxed into a corner, it’s gross error and vulgar nonsense one must call on to advance. Or whatever’s at hand. Whatever is finally personal, that needn’t and probably won’t fit any official, useful scheme. Or even work. Maybe never. There’s a kind of faith in this, but not of a nice kind.
So, these paintings are different than the work that has come before them. If not in the look of the finished result (old habits die hard!), than certainly in the motivation and aims of their creation. There’s a lot of unfinished business in this bunch. They’re less concerned with saying something persuasively, than being finding out how to be free of that imposition. They’re exploratory. They’re more fucked up and more happy. They’re at least partially ridiculous, certainly nearly completely useless. They can’t even claim the official title of having been really felt, deeply wanted, enjoyed or even understood while being created. They’re a lot of failure here. But, created they are, nonetheless.
It used to be that the artist knocked themselves out to deliver certain kind of experience to the viewer. Modernity insists that’s this is viewer’s job now.
The artists aren’t in control of the images anymore.
I hope that in the age we are entering of impersonal recordings, measurings and manipulations of every sort, of ungodly efficiently, testings, mass marketings and polls, I hope this wholly imperfect, incomplete, tiny, uncertain and ad hoc bunch of paintings bring you some joy. Or ignites some scorn. Or lets you off easy. Or whatever floats your boat.
– James Huctwith, 2009
James Huctwith Bio:
James Huctwith is an artist, an oil painter, who lives and works in downtown Toronto. Born in 1967, he was raised in the small town of Cayuga, Ontario. He attended Cayuga Secondary School from 1981 until 1986, graduating with honours from Grade Thirteen. Afterwards, he studied fine art for three years at the University of Guelph, where he cites professors Margaret Priest and Suzy Lake as influences.
After this, he lived in Vancouver in the early ‘90’s where he first began to paint and exhibit. Returning to Toronto in 1995, he began producing and exhibiting professionally with the O’Connor Gallery. In the spring of 2005, Huctwith joined Gallery Jones in Vancouver, and began producing non-figurative work, in contrast to the O’Connor shows which had been physically and emotionally explicit. Leaving O’Connor Gallery and joining Galerie Harwood near Montreal in 2006 provided new avenues of expression for the artist, the first evidence of which was evidenced in intense new large-scale figurative work series and a new show of lush, provocative still lifes.
In 2008, Mr. Huctwith returned to figurative work with La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa, and Antonio Arch Fine Art Limited in Toronto.
Both published and regularly reviewed, shown across Canada, and his work is collected both nationally and internationally.
Solo Exhibitions
October 2007, Galerie Harwood Answered Prayers Oil Paintings
October 2005, O’Connor Gallery Continuous Banquet Oil Paintings and Drawings
November 2004, O’Connor Gallery New Paintings Oil Paintings
October 2003, O’Connor Gallery Institutional Oil Paintings
November 2002, O’Connor Gallery. Deep Water Oil Paintings
November 1999, O’Connor Gallery. Camera Obscura Oil Paintings
November 1997, O’Connor Gallery. Key To The City Oil Paintings
March 1996, O’Connor Gallery. Degenerate Art Oil Paintings
Group Shows
October 2008 Answered Prayers Galerie Harwood
March 2008 Saint Sebastian CFM Gallery, New York City
May 2007 Introductions Galerie Harwood
August 2006 ArtPositive! Exhibition XPACE, Ottawa
May 2006 Gallery Jones, Vancouver.
July 2005 ArtPositive! Exhibition, Ottawa TorreLazur-MaclarenMcCann/
November 2000 Toronto International Art Fair Represented by O’Connor Gallery
October 2001 Toronto International Art Fair Represented by O’Connor Gallery
1996 Octavia Gallery Opening, Vancouver
1994 Ed Video Group Show, Guelph
Published
October 2006 Stripped: The Illustrated Male Bruno Gmunder, GmbH
2004 Mondo Homo Alyson Books
Thank you,
Guy Berube, director
La Petite Mort Gallery