Alan Glicksman - Artist

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VISUAL ARTS: GALLERY GOING

Weekend Review Special Report

A holy fool's divine folly

GARY MICHAEL DAULT

12 November 2005

The Globe and Mail

 

Alan Glicksman at Engine Gallery

$685-$9,000. Until Nov. 16.

1112 Queen St. W., Toronto;

416-531-9905  

 

Sometimes an exhibition seems so forceful and assured, it comes on like a sudden explosion from nowhere — spontaneous, unexpected, contextless, full of newly minted joy. Then you catch up with the artist's track record and you realize this new whirlwind of accomplishment has, of course, been years in the making. Such is the case with this superb exhibition of new paintings by Alan Glicksman, now showing at Toronto's Engine Gallery.

Glicksman, who used to work in Toronto but has now moved to Owen Sound, Ont., has been painting since the mid 1970s. For a long time I was only mildly interested in what he did. His work consisted of brightly coloured, rather roughly hewn, neo-primitive figures that looked both childlike and totemic — a strange, unsettling mix of art brut (reminiscent of the earlier paintings of the French neo-primitive Jean Dubuffet) and persistent guilelessness.

But, as poet William Blake once wrote, “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise,” or words to that effect. It's not so much that Glicksman has been a fool (well, a holy fool, maybe; a transcendental goof), but more that he has persisted in a certain mad way of painting to the point where something has cracked wide open, and he is now in a sort of painterly free fall, painting with a demented urgency that piles paroxysms of delight into every picture.

It's difficult to describe Glicksman's paintings because when you try, you end up with a list of hectic and possibly rapturous adjectives that is fun to compile but which, I am pretty certain, makes for tedious reading.

Let us say this much: The paintings are all in oil (nothing but the best for this demonized painter, who is now going all out), and most of them are big (and even the little ones are big — if, by big, we mean monumentally conceived and teeming with incident). Many of Glicksman's painting are, he maintains, autobiographical or at least journal-like. There is a lot of red in them. And searing blues and scalding yellows. And although the paintings still teem with masks and clatter with stick figures, and there are still arms and legs starting off in every direction, what is new and distinguished about them is the gleefully tempestuous brushwork he lavishes upon each picture, the exhilarating, bravado-filled passages of pure chromatic fervour brushed in everywhere, the cross-hatching, the pigmented dots and dashes, curls and swipes and twists left in the wake of Glicksman's marauding brush.

Does Alan Glicksman not know that painting is in crisis? That hedonism is suspect? That beauty is subversive? Ask him if he cares. He'll be too busy persisting in his folly.

 

 

Features Art

ON SHOW Glicksman's people stand strong, naked

JOHN BENTLEY MAYS

 

28 June 1984

The Globe and Mail

 

Alan Glicksman at Studio 620, 620 Richmond St. W., to June 30.

For several years now, Toronto artist Alan Glicksman, 29, has been creating a curious, vigorous tribe of men, women and persons of ambiguous gender. They are drawn raw and fast in whatever medium Glicksman finds at hand - this show features paintings and watercolors, wood sculptures, prints and drawings, unique books, works of ambiguous medium - and they stand naked before us, these strong creatures, as foreign as Picasso's savage nudes, as ordinary and familiar as ourselves with our clothes off. For this big and exuberant show, Glicksman's first since 1982, the artist has fathered dozens of new people in all shapes and sizes: this exhibition can be read as a nursery in some vivid, apocalyptic new world - a child's planet, with all the wonder and savagery such a world would have.

Glicksman's art can plausibly be understood as a series of separable items. This array contains cloudy, densely worked steel engravings, a group of three related paintings about mysterious night-time encounters between hurtling cars and visionary women, a beautiful set of 70 watercolors featuring people and fragments of language careening through spaces of topical color and sensuality. Any of these can be bought and carried away.

But his work may also be seen as a long trail of clues about the churning imagination at the centre of this process of image-making. No single object seems able to hold his attention for very long. A piece of paper, or a scrap of lumber, or a plate of steel suddenly becomes a field of furious activity - then is left as quickly. The result is not a sequence of attempted masterpieces. Instead, it is an endless, fractured, fragmentary narrative of psychological inquiry involving text, image, color, line. The precedents for this manner of working may be found in literature more readily than in visual art; Walt Whitman, and the plays and operas of Gertrude Stein come immediately to mind. But there is also William Blake to remind us of the power of poetry and imagery united.

Glicksman has inherited Klee's interest in the art of children, along with the Cubists' interest in primitive sculpture, and recombined that information into a fresh, poetic and inquisitive musing about his own life in the body and time. In terms of composition, color and sheer vitality of visual and literary language, there is probably no artist in Canada who does this kind of thing better than he does.

 

JOHN BENTLEY MAYS

 

15 May 1982

The Globe and Mail

 

Artist records his own torments

Alan Glicksman, who is showing four exuberant installations at Lacemakers Gallery (753 Queen St. W.) until May 22, is the working definition of the creative kid next door who lived to be 27, and is still at it. During a recent eight-month sojourn in New York, this Toronto artist drew, painted, collaged, and otherwise assembled a daunting array of works (little and big) including the four pieces in this show. But Glicksman is not only a fast, work-obsessed artist. He is also a distinctive draftsman who, as we find in these works, is thinking hard with his hands, and creating in this art, not monuments for the future, but an unstopping record of his own stormy spiritual weathers.

Each of these four large combine-drawings is composed largely of the paper and sheer junk Glicksman found on the streets of New York: at this most elementary level, they are scrapbooks of Manhattan, and open embraces of the grubby physical truth of those mean streets. But they are also icons of Glicksman's vexed and difficult attempts to embrace himself.

In Nervous Laughter and Black Bondage, for example, he draws on African crafts and such early-modern sources as Picasso, Klee and the Surrealists to symbolize the quarrels over sexuality, death and the future going on inside his head: processions of towering figures named "my echo" (a pregnant woman), "my shadow" and such march through the disarray of materials, an awkward dada parade of the various selves Glicksman feels himself to be.

The work is fast, but handsome, and psychologically intriguing. But there is also something honest about this audacious project of explanation and consideration. "The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing," Gertrude Stein said. She wasn't talking about Alan Glicksman's work, but the words in it.

 

 

Dashing off witty little snippets of life

JOHN BENTLEY MAYS

 

18 May 1981

The Globe and Mail

 

The work of Alan Glicksman proves that, contrary to a widespread belief, solid art-school training doesn't necessarily knock the youngster out of an artist and turn him into a sober-sided and very adult maker of tasteful objects for other adults. The evidence can be seen at Lacemaker's Gallery (753 Queen St. W.).

I'm not exactly sure how many items are in the show, since this 26-y ear-old Toronto artist is likely to change them around rather quickly - his dealers notwithstanding. (The first time I visited the exhibition, installed both in Lacemaker's pleasant storefront gallery and in its murky, low-ceilinged basement, I counted 52 collages, paintings, drawings, cutouts and works in various combined media.) But one work is likely to stay the same: the installation, simply titled Love and set up in one corner of the basement. This assemblage sums up succinctly what Glicksman is doing in these works, which he has collectively christened the Soapbox Series.

In the tradition of contemporary installation artists Claes Oldenburg and David Buchan, Glicksman gives us a bedroom. At least there's a bed in it, and a fifties-style radio (blaring out bubblegum rock and roll), and a cute little ceramic doe on the bedside table - rather more than enough clues that this isn't a real grownup's bedroom, but the basement digs of a teenage girl. In fact, the resident is probably the same rather alarmed-l ooking girl lying nude on the short bed and watching her nude boy friend, who stands at the foot of the bed. You don't have to hang around this installation long to know what both parties about to experience: suburban rec-room initiation.

If all this sounds raunchy, it isn't. The figures are charming, childlike cutouts, drawn quickly and painted as rapidly before being propped up on the three-dimensional stage set. But if the depictions of the couple are as clumsy as a youngster's drawings, this little tableau is saturated with the kind of marvellously adolescent sexual humor I haven't seen since Florence Vale's retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Like Miss Vale (who is 50 years his senior but shares much with him), Glicksman portrays his fascinated man and woman as the strange creatures they must seem to each other at that moment - he, a hulk with nervously tapping feet (animated by a little fan in this installation) and a huge penis drawn on accordian-folded paper; she, a flat mat whose most prominent feature is a bony knothole at the appropriate position.

Glickman's subjects include young men and women involved in all sorts of sexual approaches; cats, dogs and other more fanciful pets (an albino rhino, for example); mother, grandfather, girl friend and friends, lighting candles on solemn Jewish religious occasions or just looking at the artist. He draws them with grade-school speed and an impudent disregard for the finesse he learned in life-drawing classes at the Ontario College of Art.

What results are reams and bales of drawings and paintings which, I suspect, some discerning people might think should never have been shown. They are crude, and most of them look like shots in the dark, or studies or leaves ripped from notebooks. Glicksman doesn't mind quoting outright from Picasso or Klee or Dubuffet, and damn the footnotes.

But there is something very refreshing about a show of such unguarded moments, especially in the context of the careerist, calculating Toronto art world. What we see is an unfolding and very engaging portrait of the artist as a young man, sketching again and again his fantasies, his realities, and his views of the moment on the problems raised in his life by sex, family, the past and the rigors of his artistic training. It's a show that modern searchers for the child and the wild in us - Picasso, Klee and, of course, Florence Vale come immediately to mind - would understand very well indeed. 

 

 

 

Gallery reviews

James Purdie

 

21 October 1978

The Globe and Mail

OTHER GALLERIES The University of Guelph is emerging as an art school to be reckoned with, if the Royal Bank's Artventure program is a measure. Two of its painters have won cash awards in the current juried exhibition of student work from several schools now showing on the mezzanine floor of the Royal Bank Plaza. Alan Glicksman won the $400 top prize for his canvas, Reflections, the Shiva House, and Louise Cain (who won a top award in the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition earlier) was awarded the $200 second prize. The third went to Ian Ross, a student at the University of Windsor.  

For further information contact:
alanglicksman@rogers.com