ROBERT LINSLEYA GEOMORPHIC FANTASY

ROBERT LINSLEYA GEOMORPHIC FANTASY

Robert Linsley has devoted the last thirteen years of his practice to exploring the intersection of abstraction and the limits of representation. Inspired in part by the discoveries and trajectory of thinking practiced by theo-retical physicists, Linsley creates pictures that invite us to be flexible in our thinking, to break our own rules of what and who makes a painting.

Borrowing its title from Linsley’s major six part work, A Geomorphic Fantasy, this exhibition traces the evolution of Linsley’s experiments from efficient, almost calligraphic, canvases to the multi-hued “island” and “channel” paintings and a selection of recent small water-colours. Linsley has rigourously pursued an abstraction which refuses to court the grid as a predetermining structure. Despite the likeness they might share with maps, Linsley’s paintings resist the necessity of coordi-nates. The poured “blobs” that fill most of his paintings are anything but static. They spur us to revisit the alle-gorical potential of islands and recall Pangea – the prehis-toric single continent that broke apart to give us the conti-nents we recognize today.

On behalf of the board members, volunteers, and staff of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, I am pleased to express our gratitude to all who have contributed to the success of this project. In particular we would like to extend sincere gratitude to Allan MacKay, former Curatorial and Collections Consultant for KW|AG, for his preliminary conversations with Linsley and initiation of the exhibition. Contributing writer Richard Shiff, offered a rumination on the relationship between amorphous shapes and the autopoetic within Linsley’s practice while Jan Verwoert’s comprehensive interview with the artist illuminated both the rigour and innovation in Linsley’s painting. Lastly, our sincerest thanks to Robert Linsley for his willingness to share his work and his contempla-tive approach to every aspect of this project.

FOREWORDBy Crystal Mowry

“What I want is for the work to make itself,” Robert Linsley says; “I don’t want it to come from me or from an external set of rules. It has to bring up its own rules from within itself.” The result—this is Linsley’s desire—will be “all discovery and improvisation.” He will learn from having resisted the pull toward rule. He admits nevertheless that his paintings may be “moderated a bit by habit.” If it’s truly no more than a bit of habit, I’d say he’s accomplished something, for habit habitually insinuates itself, regulating the flow of experience.

The grid is a longstanding cultural habit. Linsley acknowledges its dominance while reserving a space for something other: “The grid is probably inescapable, but the logic of the grid as it has played out in abstrac-tion over the last fifty years, has got to be denied.” What he proposes doesn’t come easily. Perhaps abstract art used to be somewhat easier, if only because certain possibilities within the grid remained open—this, at least, is how Linsley thinks of his inherited historical situation. Not so long ago, it was possible for an artist to use a neutral grid to escape the rules (the traditional orders of hierarchical composition). The grid facilitated abstraction more than it hindered it. Agnes Martin was one of the best at knowing what to do; she established

subtle shifts of linear quality and tone when laying out a grid in graphite. We can’t explain the captivat-ing luminosity of her surfaces as an effect of geometry, perspective, or any conventional play of oppositions. Her art marks out an obvious form—the grid itself—yet the whole seems formless, utterly without relational parts. This is its magic. Ironically, during Martin’s own lifetime, which spanned most of the twentieth century and a few years beyond, the neutral structure of the grid became so freighted with art theory and so central an element in the critical discourse that it acquired ideological implications. The grid became the essence of painting, its authoritative guide, directing abstract artists to acknowledge its presence, often by mimick-ing its expanse (for example, in various modes of all-over painting, including work in monochrome). Linsley’s generation lost the option of exploring the grid as open-ly as Martin managed to do.

Since abstract art seemed so channeled, Linsley decided to set his painting adrift. But where could his practice turn? The blob presented possibilities. A blob of paint is a form, or rather a non-form, that will “make itself.” Linsley became a painter of the blob. In the scheme of art theory, a blob is nowhere: it’s neither suffi-ciently articulate to contribute to effective composition, nor is it sufficiently vague to count as formless. A blob is specific: it’s the shape that it is. In conversation, Linsley doesn’t shy away from describing his typical pictorial elements with such casual, potentially self-deprecating

REALITYBy Richard Shiff

Grey Oval 2005

language. “Blob” is a word he uses freely, shamelessly. If his descriptive term seems frivolous, his official titles compensate with heavier connotations. His painting First Aeon is one of a series of six canvases that comprise A Geomorphic Fantasy (2002-2007), each with dimensions that he adopted as a standard (6 feet in height, 5 feet in width). These panels imaginatively reconstitute six periods of deep, unfathomable time, six stages in the painter’s materialization of a physical world in the making. I mean this in-the-making in a double sense: Linsley is depicting an origin-of-the-world scenario and doing it with an action that “makes itself,” a set of self-forming, originary gestures. So his actual process corresponds to his representational fantasy; the material fact suits the image it fantasizes.

The appearance of each of the six paintings evokes islands emerging from a surrounding sea, an associa-tion Linsley’s title encourages. Here, a sense of place arises from nothing and nowhere; the blob-like forms, specific but hardly what we call precise, appear self-contained by comparison with the spatially neutral, formless ground. First Aeon contains seven “blobs” or “islands.” The paint itself is commercial enamel or alkyd—house paint, a basic industrial product. If Linsley generates some kind of aesthetic refinement, it seems to originate from a handicapped situation—his materi-als are ordinary and applied with a gesture only barely associated with aesthetic articulation. He simply pours the paint.

Linsley’s relatively long reach—he is 6 feet 6 inches tall—allows him to hold his 6 by 5 feet of stretched canvas and turn and tip it while a pour of paint remains in a fluid state. This degree of physical control is enough to allow the emergent forms to avoid the grid. Linsley turns the separate pour of paint so that, however varied they may be collectively, each orients its primary axis to the diagonal, as if the pour were oblivious to its exter-nal, orthogonal container. In fact, if we consider the implied direction of flow, nothing at all contains Lins-ley’s pours. In First Aeon, he has let three of the seven blobs extend to the physical edges of the canvas, with the suggestion that they continue into a space beyond.

Using the diagonal causes the islands to seem to float in an infinite sea of surface (First Aeon has a pale green “sea”), as if the position of each island were determined quite by chance. In Linsley, there is more Arp than Mondrian, and ultimately a bit of Martin: he achieves with a blob something analogous to what she achieved with a grid—a new visual possibility. Linsley’s opening derives from his historical reflection, which becomes his insight: “I find a lot to work with in the diagonal recession of the Baroque.”

“My poured Island paintings present a moment when the process, the flow of paint, has stopped.” It stops. Linsley hasn’t acted to stop it. At least this is his fantasy concerning the formless formation of his “islands” of color. Paradoxically, his islands are total form because the shape of each is so specific and, as Linsley knows, inimitable. The proof that his island “makes itself” comes in the realization that he would be incapable of recreating the same shape. With a second hand-held pour, the external contour would necessarily be differ-ent because of the many physical variables: the specific viscosity, the momentum of the pouring motion, the drying time as affected by atmospheric conditions, and so forth. Additional pouring or corrective adjustment with a brush would only generate further qualitative difference. Every pour represents what Linsley calls “constant novelty”; it’s unique at every instant of its non-reiterative action.

A Linsley island meets no objective standard of shape any more than a geological island does; each has its proper form, proper to its physical formation result-ing from natural forces. When Linsley admits to “a bit of habit,” he can’t be referring to regularizing the blobs. Instead, he might be recognizing that he prefers certain colors and harmonies or has a tendency to distribute forms with certain implied movements. Often I sense a centripetal force in the distribution of the blobs, with diagonals bending inward into curves; this is especially evident in a number of works having an oval format. In any event, Linsley keeps breaking his own rules, apply-ing one of his inclinations (spontaneity) to counteract another (reasoned regularity). In principle, the “sea” surrounding an island should be a continuous color, connoting a single substance; this would constitute its regularity. But Linsley’s Fifth Aeon and Sixth Aeon divide their respective seas into distinct fields of color, which also appear to truncate some of the poured

LEFT: A Geomorphic Fantasy: First Aeon 2002 - 2007

OVERLEAF: A Geomorphic Fantasy 2002 - 2007(left to right) Fifth Aeon and Sixth Aeon

Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Center for the Study of Modernism. He publishes extensively on modern art and its criticism and theory. His recent books include Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (Yale, 2004) and Doubt (Routledge, 2008). An interpretive study of the art of Willem de Kooning is in press (Reaktion, 2011).

LEFT: A Geomorphic Fantasy: Second Study 2003

OVERLEAF: A Geomorphic Fantasy 2002 - 2007

islands. The Fifth Aeon performs this division with a diagonal, while the Sixth Aeon uses a curve—more spontaneity, less regularity, less reason. If the features common to Linsley’s first four canvases in his Geomor-phic Fantasy establish a certain geomorphic order (islands in a primordial sea), then his final two canvases appear as arbitrary, unpredictable events, as if to prove that any inference of emergent order could only have been mistaken. Linsley corrects his tendency to “a bit of habit” as well as frustrating his viewer’s interpre-tive expectations. We are left hanging on the sensa-tion—needing to return to each of the six images of the series, to regard each all the more intently for its specific qualities. We discover that we need to look longer, look harder, at what we may have thought we already under-stood.

“For an abstract painting,” Linsley says, “the best kind of event is always one that occurs beyond the artist.” By this, he means that we shouldn’t rely on a fixed sense of the artist’s personality or characteristic expression as a way of establishing the meaning of our experience of a work. Personality can be a habit. Sensory experience becomes that much richer when it takes an artist or a viewer out of the personality, beyond it. Linsley’s paint-ing “doesn’t tell a story—it is a story.” Your personality, your character, is your story of yourself. There’s a world beyond each of us, beyond the story we habitually tell. Such a world is a story we would do well to discover, “all discovery and improvisation,” as Linsley says. Call it a Geomorphic Fantasy, if you will, but it isn’t just a fanta-sy—it’s reality. It’s better to have been there than not.

NOTE: Sources for the quotations from Robert Linsley are his publications, Recent Work (Vancouver: Old Mill Books, 2008) and A Geomorphic Fantasy (2008), as well as his conversations with the author (March through November 2010).

The following is an excerpt of a telephone conver-sation between Robert Linsley and Jan Verwoert that took place on December 21, 2010.

Jan Verwoert: Robert, what I find striking about your enamel Island paintings, and also your new waterco-lours, is how the shapes in these works are defined by their edges, that is, by the complex, irregular, unpredict-able boundary that forms the circumference of a patch or blob of colour, and defines it as what it is. Could you talk a little about the edges?

Robert Linsley: Well, in my Island paintings the edge is where everything happens because I can’t fully control it. I might have a shape that I like and a bead of paint will break through the edge and then I have a different shape and have to adapt and go with it. In the watercolours I had to give up the pouring method and go back to the paintbrush, so I have to invent the shape. I lose the uncontrollable aspects of the pouring technique, but I also gain something which I don’t have in the enamels, which is transparency. A very beauti-ful thing. It’s interesting that you asked that question. That’s a very concrete formal observation.

JV: So in the enamel paintings the method is to pour paint onto the canvas and move the canvas while the paint runs over the surface. Is the outcome then a prod-uct of chance?

RL: No, I’m looking for a way to overcome any distinc-tion between chance and determination. An artwork should cancel out all distinctions between the execu-tive and the legislative; the invention and the making should be one thing.

JV: And so you think that the pouring of the paint onto the canvas is an act in which a decision happens and immediately takes a permanent form.

RL: Yes, the whole thing is moving so all the choices are intrinsic to the process. It’s like playing music really.

JV: In what way is the whole thing moving?

RL: The paint is constantly moving and the picture is constantly moving because it is emerging as I work. This is an important point which is very much true about the watercolours as well. My work is in a modern tradition in which the process is entirely additive. You can’t go back and make any corrections or changes, all you can do is add. That’s always been a characteris-tic of watercolour and that is why it has always been regarded as a difficult and treacherous medium; every-thing has to be right the first time, and that’s always been a challenge. Academic watercolour painters and professional illustrators have developed all kinds of elaborate techniques to gain control of the medium.

Pink Oval 2005

SHORES

My method is very simple, it’s just coloured stains on the paper. Alexis Harding said something that I thought was quite apt when he first saw them, that they were very factual. They just are what they are, which is also a classic modernist stance you might say.

In classic modernism, take Cézanne as a good exam-ple, there are endless corrections and rethinking, which I find a very attractive thing, as probably most artists do. The picture has a future and a past and one can move back and forth between them. One can go back in time and change what happened, to get a different result. You were saying that the work of Tomma Abts is a palimpsest of changes. I think her work moves in one direction also, but there is the memory of previ-ous states showing through the surface. That’s what I have in my watercolours, but in the enamels any kind of layering is very problematic for technical reasons, so the pressure to get it right in one gesture is even greater. The picture is always on the edge of going wrong.

The whole thing is in motion because the picture is emerging, but I don’t know exactly what is going to emerge so I have to respond to it as it happens. I think it’s very much like improvised music, which had a big effect on me when I was younger. In that sense there’s nothing new about it, but it’s a bit unusual in the visual arts. Still there is a lineage: Pollock, Frankenthaler, Louis and Smithson, for me those would be the artists whose work is constantly falling forward. It can’t be planned, it can’t be corrected, and in a sense it can’t be finished. Does that make sense?

JV: Totally, so there is a temporal dimension to it, when you are working with the enamel paint you are always in the present tense. That is the limit. But, as you say, that limit keeps moving. So you never end up with just one line, one boundary, one clear form. What is striking about the actual shapes that result from your process is that they are not instantly recognizable. True, they look a little bit like islands, but that is only because their outlines are so complex that you cannot easily say what they are. They’re neither a square nor a circle. The line around them, their circumference, contains most of the

information. The inside of the shape is usually defined by one colour only. So while the edge is a crucial defin-ing feature, you do not keep the edge simple, as a certain tradition of geometric painting would have it.

RL: I very consciously do my best to avoid horizon-tals and verticals. Which is not easy, because even in the most amorphous and chaotic paintings, grids will emerge. Look at an all over picture with an equal density of incidents over its surface and you’ll find a grid there somewhere. I try to keep everything on the diagonal. Yes, the individual shapes are compli-cated, but each shape also connects up—or suggests connections—with the other shapes, including partially completed shapes in the negative areas. So the picture is a very intricate layering of broken or partial shapes; they can jump across from one blob to another, and they are superimposed on each other. I like that because I want the picture to be more complicated than I can grasp. In the moving present I can’t grasp much, but my accumulated knowledge, call it the unconscious or whatever you want, can grasp more, just as you know from playing music. You know where to go even though you are not making conscious decisions all the time...

JV: Or you don’t consciously monitor what you are doing.

RL: You don’t. So there’s a level of achievable complex-ity beyond my conscious awareness, but I want it to be even more complex than that. My vision of an artwork is of a beautiful complicated universe in which I can be lost. The intractable medium of enamel and the addi-tive process give some extra drama to the improvisa-tion, by making it more difficult to get a good result, but I think it’s the result that matters, and that means a composition more intricate and more articulated than we commonly see in abstraction today.

JV: True, but is it not also significant that the shapes you produce in this process are defined by their edges and not by any other more easily recognizable features?

RL: Like an image for example…

JV: …or a figure or volume. As they are defined through the edges, their inside is determined by their outside. There is no principle internal to the shapes which determines their identity, but there is something about the externality of that edge through which the shape defines itself that makes it very sensual.

Muggleton Archipelago 2000

RL: But when I’m pouring a blob, and the edge is moving down the canvas, some areas of paint are a little thicker than others. The paint never moves in one even line, it always comes down in fingers, because some parts are moving faster and some are thicker. I can turn it sideways and the fingers will then flow together to close off the shape, but there will always be these little protuberances poking through. So you could say, metaphorically, that’s there something in the body of the paint that’s trying to push its way out, a ghost or a demon that’s trying to poke its arms and legs and face through the edge of that paint.

JV: Ok, there’s a force that drives the paint towards its edges, but it’s still on and through the edge that the shape defines itself, so that, metaphorically speaking, it always defines itself in terms of difference and rela-tionality. When something is defined through the edge, it’s defined in relation to what’s around it, to what it is not, but on which it touches. It’s all around this line of sensual distinction that this shape comes into being.

RL: Yes, but the edge itself is infinitesimal, and on either side there are two emptinesses. The inside of the shape is just a monochrome area, as you pointed out. There are a few little incidents—maybe a bit of dirt stuck in the paint, there might be a smudge, my finger might touch it and leave a fingerprint. On the outside there’s the empty ocean. So everything in my work is happening in an infinitessimally small space between two voids, which you could call the edge.

JV: Mmh…

RL: The inside of the blob is nothing, because I want to empty out all of the accumulated history of contem-porary and modern art, all the meanings, the meta-phors, the allegories, the politics, the history. And on the outside of the form is the negative space of the picture which is, speaking metaphorically, our ordi-nary life, ordinary time spent, ordinary labour, which is empty in a different way. In art today, where does the actual work happen? Artists spend a lot of their time on paperwork, taxes, phone calls, buying materials, giving instructions to their employees—most of that is empty time and empty labour, same as everyone has to endure. And yet where are you going to find an alter-native? To take models from historical art is a kind of sentimentality, wishful thinking. I wonder if the notion that in art you can find an unalienated labour is not just

illusion. But there is a moment, as you said, in the pres-ent, on that edge, worth living in.

JV: In a previous conversation, I remember, you talked a lot about labour in relation to the time spent work-ing on a painting. You were saying that letting the paint pour was a way of allowing the paint to do some of the work for you. This already articulates a different stance towards work: work here is not just a linear process of making decisions and then executing them, but a form of spending time, not just producing, but also watching how things finds their own way. To allow for that moment to happen and accept it, defies mindless productivism, it implies a different ethics to spending time. Now you also related this difference between alienated and unalienated labour to a spatial distinc-tion between an inside and an outside. But is that distinction not always already given by the boundaries of a canvas, which separate the zone of mental concen-tration within the canvass from that which happens around it?

RL: Theoretically perhaps, but in practice the distinc-tion has to be made, I don’t think it’s automatic. Focus, concentration, attention, awareness are all very impor-tant, and the fact that you can control that and set a space apart from the rest of life as a kind of feedback loop between you and what you make is definitely the first step. But it isn’t automatically given that you’re going to achieve something, because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of bad painting.

To illustrate what I mean I might mention Rothko. He is the master of the general effect. The sensitive, modulated, breathing surface he is known for is too general for me, as are his delicately expanded blocks of colour. Certainly one can feel his presence in the work, but even that feeling lacks something of the concrete and particular. Whatever I hope for in the way of non-alienated or meaningful work is going to happen on the moving edge as a matter of very particular and specific turns, bumps and hollows. The edge is a non-existent space between two areas of colour—but it makes a very striking pattern, and that means a very definite feeling.

JV: Ja, indeed. Would you relate the unalienated to the infinitessimal then? Would that mean to imagine an infi-nitessimal labour to be unalienated? As no edge will ever be the same? We produce the freedom to continue painting the edge… In this light, what you said previ-

ously about keeping the grid out makes a lot of sense, as a rejection of the idea that paintings should illustrate a priori conceptual assumptions, like the belief in some kind of higher rationality manifested in right angles. You take the liberty to interpret the edge in a different way, which doesn’t suggest that the only edge that can define something is a hard edge. But why do you call the shapes that result from this process “islands?”

RL: First of all, it’s a political metaphor. When I first thought of it I found very attractive because islands are always places where exiles and refugees collect. And then it’s a structural metaphor because inside/outside appears in the picture as an image, the inside of the island and the outside of the island (the ocean), but if you think of it metaphorically then it is also the artwork in relation to society, and many other philosophical questions—subject and object, mind and matter, what-ever dualism takes your fancy, presented schematically, like a diagram. That’s why I was briefly interested in Luhmann’s systems theory, which is about the demar-cation of a form inside a form, has all sorts of social, soci-ological and political implications, and is also diagram-matic.

But clearly my work has some memory of surreal-ism, with ideas of free association and the emergence of images. Some of my shapes do look like figures, or animals, and this becomes a pictorial problem. I have to decide while I’m working to what extent I will allow the figurative to come through, and to what extent am I going to stick to an ethical position that holds that the picture should be as abstract as possible.

JV: Right, speaking about materialist ethics in painting today, I believe the question may be how to go beyond a numb literalism which maintains that a square is a square, and endlessly so. When we read ethical quali-ties into an image, it seems we do so on the basis of metaphor. To accept such material metaphors might even allow us to reject a false alternative: between talkative figuration that talks a lot but does nothing, and materialist abstraction that does what it does but doesn’t say very much beyond that. By working toward material metaphors we might get to something that, in all its opacity, still also produces a sort of readability, without necessarily telling a story.

RL: Exactly, that’s very good. I have a picture hanging in my house right now, and yesterday I was looking at

a couple of shapes, and I thought they have so much character or personality, they are alive, just as shapes. You have to bring to the picture the capacity to see that, granted, but it’s also objectively there in the shapes. Maybe one explanation is that it’s primitive magical thinking that sees things as alive. The most primitive forms of thought are quite present in our modern culture, we know that. But so is the enlightenment desire to dispel myths, and to destroy magical thinking, and modern art has participated in that rationality. I think that artists are rationalists, especially me, because I’m totally preoccupied with the mechanisms of my art and I treat them objectively. The figurative is the animating projection, the abstract is the rational construction. The task is to find a productive place in the middle of these categories.

JV: I love the idea of going back to an understanding of animism in painting. Because why would we assume that painting has the power to touch us, if not on the basis that, as you say, we still adhere to animist beliefs, to some extent. If we perceive paintings as animated, when they affect us, I find it absolutely reasonable to say that they have some kind of soul. The point may be to recoup the sensitivity that an animist world view gives us, but not arrest that sensitivity in a mythology.

Metaphor and animism may actually have a lot to do with each other. Metaphor is all about relationality, about seeing one thing as another, or in another. So is animism; it deals with how things relate, how the spirits talk to the objects and the objects talk to the devils; how the planets, the plants, the organs in the body, the humours and the moods are related. In its more auto-cratic moments modernism denied relationality in favour of some idea of purity, and therefore tried to get rid of metaphor as a reminder of the messy web of rela-tions we find ourselves tied into. To acknowledge meta-phor would allow relationality to play out its forces.

RL: Exactly. But Marx taught us quite clearly that magi-cal thinking is everywhere in modernity. Complete superstition is the norm, so the enlightenment critique of myth is still valid in my view. I think that artists should be rationalists, but rationalists who have learned to live with animistic psychology as well.

JV: Yes, but is there not a difference between a form of superstition that expresses the will to submit oneself to the influence of some imaginary higher forces, and

Congregation Shoals 2000

a particular kind of sensitivity in your relationship towards the world? What I look for in animism is an attunement to the ways in which the things you can influence also influence you, a heightened awareness of relationality. So when you are affected by how different shapes relate to each other on a canvas, in terms of how their edges touch or don’t touch, you could very much see this as a metaphor for how we experience convivial-ity or co-inhabitation.

RL: Absolutely, and in fact I use that explicitly in one of my Island pictures. It has a lot of small islands that fall into groups that communicate by colour or proximity. It’s called “Congregation Shoals.”

JV: Meaning so very often is premised on the affec-tive dimension of relationality, the manner in which the way people relate to each other—or a work, creature or thing—will determine what understanding they arrive at together. This emotive moment of relationality could be precisely what is inscribed into a work on the level of its animist capacities. Which brings us back to ethics, for what kind of relations do we actually hope a work to engender? We were speaking about an ethos concern-ing labour, could we extend that to social relations? This perhaps is the question that our conversation here has led us to ask of art.

Jan Verwoert is a critic based in Berlin. He is a contrib-uting editor of frieze magazine and his writing has been published in different journals, catalogues and antholo-gies. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, the De Appel Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam and the Hamidrasha School of Art, Tel Aviv. His books include Bas Jan Ader - In Search of the Miraculous (Afterall Books/MIT Press, 2006) and the collection of his essays Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want (Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute 2010).

LIST OF WORKSAll works are courtesy of the artist.

Scintillana 1998Enamel on canvas72” x 60”

Flood 2000Enamel on canvas72” x 60”

A Geomorphic Fantasy 2002 - 2007Enamel on canvasEach canvas 72” x 60”

First Aeon Second Aeon Third Aeon Fourth Aeon Fifth Aeon Sixth Aeon

Muggleton Archipelago 2000Enamel on canvas72” x 60”

Congregation Shoals 2000Enamel on canvas72” x 60”

A Geomorphic Fantasy (Second Study) 2003Enamel on woodTen panels 20” x 16”

Evening Channels 2007Enamel and alkyd on canvas78” x 66”

Wave 2008Enamel and alkyd on canvas78” x 66”

Pink Oval 2005Enamel and alkyd on panel72” x 60”

Grey Oval 2005Enamel and alkyd on panel72” x 60”

Untitled Watercolours 2010Watercolour on paperEach measures 22” x 30”

Artist’s Acknowledgements: This show was origi-nated by Allan MacKay, and my first thank you is to him, and to Alf Bogusky for supporting the project. Alf, Allan and I were all newcomers to Kitchener about nine or ten years ago, and they have been good colleagues. During that time Allan included me in two group shows at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, so this show origi-nates in a long familiarity with the work. My next debt of gratitude is to Crystal Mowry, who enthusiastically took over the show after Allan left the gallery. She has exhibited a rare sensitivity to the work and a genuine interest in it. Further thanks are due to the gallery staff for their help and professionalism.

I owe a special debt to those friends and interlocu-tors who have helped me to stay alive intellectually and creatively, and thereby enabled my work to grow. Two who must be mentioned are the contributors to this catalogue, Richard Shiff and Jan Verwoert. In an impor-tant sense they are the first audience for the work, and I’m very grateful that they have given it their time.

The research undertaken at the University of Waterloo during my time there, supported by substantial fund-ing from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, helped me to develop my work

and my thinking about abstraction in general, largely because of the people it brought me in touch with. I owe a lot to my collaborators, more than they know, whether they were research fellows or visitors, and this is a good opportunity to acknowledge them. Artist fellows were Mike Murphy, Sasha Pierce, Jenny Phelps, Scott Lyall, Leah James, Wojciech Olejnik and Alexis Harding. Visitors included Dario Gamboni, Friedrich Weltzien, Blake Rayne, Nicola Staeglich, Francis Halsall, Lourdes Morales, Mette Gieskes and Jess Gibson. Very impor-tant material support came from David Mirvish, whose friendship and collection both continue to be very important for what I do. In Kitchener we also had signif-icant support from Ron Doyle. But most importantly, before coming to Kitchener, during the research and ongoing still, I would not have discovered any Islands at all without the friendship and ideas of Shep Steiner and Andreas Neufert.

Lastly I would like to thank those gallerists and cura-tors who have shown this work over the last ten years. Aside from Allan they have included Andrew Hunter, Felix Ringel, Jeffrey Swartz, Johann Döbele, Dyan Marie, Benjamin Diaz, Miguel Abreu, Grant Arnold, Bruce Grenville, Chris Brayshaw and Steve Tong, Jan Tumlir, Randy Sommer and Bob Gunderman.

Robert Linsley is an artist who currently lives in Kitchener, Ontario. He lived for many years in Vancou-ver, BC, where he exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, Artspeak, Presen-tation House, and the Catriona Jeffries Gallery. Linsley has had solo exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Barcelona, Berlin and Toronto, and been included in group exhibitions in Rome, Kitchener, Portland, Los Angeles and New York.

He has written for venues and publications includ-ing the Venice Biennale, Centre d’Art Santa Monica in Barcelona, Trans>, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Instituto d’Investigaciones Estéticas in Mexico, Yishu, Oxford Art Journal, Canadian Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, Fillip, and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt.

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Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery101 Queen Street NorthKitchener, Ontario N2H 6P7www.kwag.ca

COPYRIGHT Artwork © 2010 Robert Linsley Individual texts © 2010 the authorsPublication © 2011 KW|AG

Robert Linsley: A Geomorphic FantasyJanuary 14 – March 20, 2011

ISBN 978-1-897543-09-2

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted – in any form or by any means – without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency [Access Copyright]. For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Inside front cover image: Clouds (detail), 2004, enamel and alkyd on canvas, 72” x 60”. Inside back cover image: Untitled (detail), 2004, enamel and alkyd on canvas, 72” x 60”.

Design: Matthew DupuisPhotography: Robert McNair

The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.