Text by John Bentley Mays. October, 2005.

In the twenty-five years that I have known him, Alan Glicksman has been incessantly fathering ever-new generations of the vivid folk, beasts and warriors that colonize his countless canvases, drawings, watercolours, notebooks. Who are these creatures that gaze at us and each other within Alan’s remarkable works?

 

They are human, for the most part, but not human as we human beings usually find ourselves--slogging through day-to-day things, enmeshed in the civilized deal-making that constitutes daily life for the millions. Nor are they children. They are certainly not sexual innocents.

 

Alan’s figures, instead, are ideas about being human. Or, in less abstract language, they are the mature heavenly beings that many grown-ups, weary of deadening routines and grey, soft ideas about being human, long to be: unafraid, ecstatic, alive to the world in ways that surpass mere animal vitality. Their skins glow in dozens of colours, laid down with brushes and knives roughly wielded. Most of these people are only partly tame, many are not tame at all, and all are hungry. Though the pop Freudianism of our day tends of obscure the difference between the two, the longing of Alan’s people is not neurotic and regressive hankering for infantile dependency, it is, rather, a reach for mature, fulfilled sensuous existence, for a world in which the primary colours of being have been restored to primordial intensity.

         

Because Alan’s hasty, rudimentary figures symbolize basic instincts and states of excitement--because his expressive hieroglyphs are all-important, and composition less important--the artist has occasionally been mistaken for one of those “outsiders,” much in vogue a few years ago. On the contrary: Alan is a creature of Modern painting, and also of Modern culture’s broader fascinations with the pre-conscious mind, education and the child, the psychological puzzles of stifled and liberated imagination. (Alan has pursued these intellectual and creative concerns through an advanced degree in child studies at the University of Toronto, and honours degrees in fine arts from both the University of Guelph and the Ontario College of Art and Design.) Supremely, however, Alan’s art is a blunt assertion of his personal will to be here and to paint here today, to probe the mystery of being Alan and being Modern, to make his mark in the most ancient sense: I was here. These are my stories, my visions. These are the beings I love, fear, hunger for, hunt.

         

The soul of Alan’s painting emanates from deep in the Romantic period, on the same gust of apocalyptic imagination that sweeps toward us from the poetry and paintings of William Blake, the myriad “Peaceable Kingdom” canvases of the American mystic Edward Hicks, the architecture and music of David Willson, the seer of Sharon, Ontario. Like the art of such metaphysically-minded creators, and the art of their spiritual descendents through the Abstractionist painters of the mid-twentieth century, Alan’s painting contests the received wisdom of our age about what’s finally important. It is not what seems to be--the grim fog of appearances that continually insists on having the title “reality”--but the incandescent, volatile, often comical, always serious, and sometimes explosive human creatureliness that is both our human birthright and destiny. This painting--in fact, all Modern painting worthy of the name--gives us back a glimpse of the creative radiance that was stolen by the dark angels of routinized industrial civilization--a radiance that was always our own--always ours--from the beginning of the world.

         

By the middle of the nineteenth century, such positive conviction about the constructive role of art in society had begun gradually to fade in the face of dismay and discouragement about Progress. (This optimistic conviction would continue to resurface in the various right and left avant-gardisms of the twentieth century, but that’s another story.) The “dark, satanic mills” of industrialization that Blake had feared might ruin our chances to regain god-like creativity now shadowed the landscapes of the modernizing world. The new commercial empires, with their philistinism and standardized, mass-reproductive culture, seemed to have all peoples in their grip. Serious artists shared the general disillusionment with Progress, and determined to use the stuff of art to express, not hope, but frustrated desire, doubts and enormously conflicted feelings about the prospects of human transformation under the sign of the Modern.

         

By my reckoning, Modern painters impressed their volatile mix of melancholy and outrage on the art world three times, setting in train certain motions in the spirit and practice of painting that echo still in Alan’s art.

         

Expressionism, the first of these episodes, emerged in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, snubbing raffiné salon painting, and indulging its own taste for raucous colours and feverish paint-work, and boldly advertising its cultural nihilism. We think of, among other unforgettable icons of the Expressionist era, the dancers of Emil Nolde, cavorting and writhing in a dionysiac dance meant to extinguish the rational and adult mind, and deliver the body wholly to chaos. Such nihilism has never been part of Alan’s longing, though scepticism about the sophistications of urban life and the organization of Western societies is deeply inscribed in his paintings. Little wonder, then, when trying to decipher the origins of Alan’s faux-naïf drawing and painterly jabs, whacks and drags, and his palette of intense colours, we find that he has visited Nolde, the early Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others in the vexed, rebellious Expressionist generation, and learned the spell-binding power of intense colour from them.

         

The second of these episodes--one with the far more acute relevance to Alan’s painting--began in the late 1920s and continued after the Second World War, and is associated with the names of Paul Klee in Germany, and, in Paris, Joan Miró and, most importantly for our purposes here, Jean Dubuffet. To varying degrees and with various levels of philosophical intensity, these artists (at least when young) were sick of civilization (as the Expressionists were) and interested (as Alan once was) in the drawings of children, tribal art, the scribblings of people who were deranged, the artwork of amateurs working outside the official art world. For Dubuffet and his comrades in this anti-rational hour, the art of madfolk, children and amateurs was pure creation, presumably uncontaminated by the machinations of the art business, education and Modern civilization in general, and therefore more innocent and spiritually life-giving than the stuff regularly sold by commercial galleries and bought by museums.

         

For Blake and certainly Dubuffet, and for Alan at various times, the contrast between the worlds of “innocence” and “experience” held an almost obsessive attraction. And it is the audacious and sophisticated Dubuffet, who most often comes to mind when viewing a Glicksman painting. Alan has never disguised his indebtedness to Dubuffet’s graffiti-like, comic-strip line, or the French artist’s technique of using canvas as a kind of bulletin board (or absurdist comic strip) composed of many small, juxtaposed pages or vignettes of imagery.

         

Such formal borrowing and homage is part and parcel of the history of painting, of course, and part of the history of Alan’s painting.           But the resemblance of Alan’s painting to that of Dubuffet can easily be overstressed. In contrast to the impudent avant-gardist Dubuffet--with his anti-beautiful surfaces compounded from all kinds of grease, tars and mess, his compulsive interest in garbage and dread, his palette of angry, fecal browns--Alan is a far more traditional painter in oils, with an easel painter’s delight in collisions and harmonies of oil colour, the sensuous process of spreading beautiful paint on cloth, and telling his simple story of imaginative liberation again and again. (The stories in Alan’s art, like those in the most memorable painting of any era, are simple, easy to grasp by anyone.)

         

The third and most recent emergence of a kind of painting that mimicked the old vocabularies of existential rage and anti-Modern sadness happened around 1980, in Germany, New York, Toronto and elsewhere. After more than a decade of art-world dominance by austere, philosophical, anti-material artistic practices--a time in which art tended to resemble art criticism or philosophical pondering more than anything hitherto called “art”--young artists everywhere were painting in oils again, furiously and in full cry against what they took to be the over-intellectualized art practices of the 1970s. The outcome of this burst of revived studio painting was called, with some fairness and more than a little unearned art-historical grandeur, neo-Expressionism.

         

I could say quite a lot about this short-lived phenomenon, during which I became an art critic and Alan embarked on his professional career as a painter. But one thing worth noting here is the speed with which this new painting was picked up by museums and private galleries and collectors everywhere, and hauled into the limelight by the mass media.

         

It was in 1981--six years after he decided to become an artist--that Alan had his first solo exhibition, at the Lacemakers’ Gallery in Toronto. (He had just completed a year in New York as Mia Westerlund’s studio assistant before returning home to Toronto.) Though the TV lights were turned up high, and everybody was talking about the new painting, 1981 was just about the worst possible moment for a painter with Alan’s gifts and convictions to emerge on the Toronto art scene. I believe this for two reasons.

         

First, his artistic project at this time was less a matter of creating one-by-one collectibles--standard-issue neo-Expressionist Art, in other words--than of endlessly filling up canvases and recovered scraps of cardboard and sketchbooks and every other graphic medium with his innumerable figures. (Though Alan has concentrated his volcanic energy on the more traditional tasks of oil painting in the last few years, he still draws and paints and doodles unceasingly on everything from calendars to plywood.) Time to understand properly what Alan was doing was, in the early nineteen-eighties, apparently in short supply.

         

More importantly, some critics (including me) were simply so happy to see real painting again, after the Conceptualist drought, that we tended to rejoice in it all, and perhaps failed to take the necessary time to separate the unmemorable from the more durable things that were being done. It was easy, for example, to like Alan’s painting for its brashness and immediacy, then probe the meaning of his project no farther. Certain aspects of his brushy, passionate paintwork simply (and accidentally) made a snug fit with the popular enthusiasms of the crowd. By the same token, it was easy to look at Alan’s painting, like it for a minute, then shrug it off as merely another instance of the vivid, noisy bohemianism of the hour. Either way, the vogue of the new painting tended to roll all the new painting into a single bundle, and deal with it as though it were all one thing.

         

Those who did look carefully, however, saw that the best Toronto neo-Expressionism divided along several lines, criss-crossing in complex ways--and that Alan was outside the intricate interplay. In standard neo-Expressionist work, there was much quick, sketchy reportage on the underworlds of punk rock clubs, drugs, flop-house living. There were countless portraits of demimondaines and other street people in various states of alienation, erotic arousal, vulnerability or collapse. A brief flirtation with fundamentalist Christianity in those years produced some memorable Crucifixion scenes. As I recall, there were a lot of dogs--of the four-legged, woofing variety--in the new painting. Dogs have always popped up in Alan’s paintings, and probably always will--though they have never been the emaciated, snarling curs of neo-Expressionism. Nor did his figures have anything in common with the more fashionable punks or bums or anguished Christs. Alan’s canvases were (and are) executed in a spirit of gentle, frank sensuous humanism that was otherwise in short supply in the stylish American and Canadian neo-Expressionist painting.

         

The second reason that 1981 was a bad year for new Toronto painters of any kind was the sudden shift in the art-world weather that occurred immediately thereafter. No sooner had neo-Expressionism become the celebrity style of the hour, influential critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Toronto, began to assail the painters as reactionary in politics, irresponsible in their uses of history and historical styles, narcissistic and simply bad. This is not the place to weigh up the punches and counter-punches thrown during that generally unfortunate minute in art history. It is enough to note that dealers and sympathetic critics dumped the new painting almost as swiftly as they had “discovered” it, and a palpable chill about all painting quickly seeped into the studios, the art schools, the museums. Photography, photo-based fabrications and the wordy or anti-sensuous “critical” practices of the nineteen-seventies were revived, or rediscovered, by key art world opinion-makers--and thereupon began the most vigorous anti-painting passage in European and American art since the Dada heyday of the teens and early ‘20s.

         

Many new painters of the early nineteen-eighties simply disappeared when the media spotlight abruptly swung away from them. Perhaps they never really had anything to say. Perhaps they felt, after the stardust was so rudely withdrawn, that making art just did not provide the same old personal thrill it once did. For his part, Alan kept painting in the manner and at the rapid rate he had painted from the outset of his engagement with art, in 1975, and continues to paint today. What we are given in this show is a small selection of works on the forward edge of the diaristic, prodigious output that has consumed most of the artist’s waking and dreaming hours for the past 30 years.