Pierre Dorion
David Elliott
Nicolas Grenier
Annie Hémond Hotte
Dil Hildebrand
Benjamin Klein
Derek Root
Etienne Zack

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Art Platform — Los Angeles /// CO/LAB section /// September 30th - October 3rd
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A project by Nicolas Grenier and Travis Diehl /// The L.A. Pedestrians
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Spatially, the art fair is awkward, a mode of display that favors the presentation of the most possible products in micro-versions of their natural settings, like bedroom sets in a furniture gallery. At the same time, each booth is a transitional space, bounded equally by modular walls and open floor, linked to adjacent booths in a manner that facilitates the viewer’s constant movement. Such a setting is far from ideal for the contemplation of most artworks. Yet perhaps painting—traditional painting on canvas, that carries with it the relative discreteness of its edges—and a form that in a way deter- mined the fair experience at its origin in the salon—is uniquely adapted among media to address this environment. The seemingly innocuous boundaries of a painting might also contain startling displacements.

The grouping of paintings forming No Horizons was selected to address the physical context of their presentation. These works, as paintings, embrace the role paintings play in such a fair; yet in the ways in which they challenge painting itself, these works confront their present setting. The exhibition consists of eight small works by eight Canadian painters. Like that of the American West, or like Los Angeles sprawl, painting in Canada was born in wide open landscapes. These works each address the ghost of this notion of space in a paradoxical way that suggests the existence of a romantic sublime, yet the promise of space goes unfulfilled, or is fulfilled in a way that deliberately denies the expectations these paintings themselves set up. Their small size draws the viewer closer, where their intensity and physical presence interrupt the continuity of the art fair—a space designed to disappear. Bent into the inverted logic of these diminuitive, dense windows, the viewer is suddenly aware of the strangeness of their surroundings.

Cumulatively, these eight spatial investigations enact a reflection on scale, the confinement of their presentation, a reconsideration of the legacy of Canadian painting, and perhaps even an attempt to renounce one sublime in order to reach another.

L.A. Pedestrians: www.lapedestrians.com
CO/LAB: http://www.artrala.org/colab_about.html