Press - Deon Venter
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OLYMPIA - Gallery Orange, Montreal, 2010
MISSING - John K. Grande, 2008 MISSING & FLIGHT 182 - Solo Exhibition, Buschlen Mowatt Gallery and Toronto International Art Fair, 2008 MISSING & FLIGHT 182 - Vie des Arte, 2008-09 THE ORDER OF THINGS - Mira Goddard, Toronto, 2006 LAST SUPPER - Parisien Laundry, Montreal, 2005 HEADLINES - Parisien Laundry, Montreal, 2005, Dr. Eva Seidner HEADLINES - Parisien Laundry, Montreal, 2005, John K. Grande HEADLINES - Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver, 2004, Gary Michael Dault HEADLINES - Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver, 2004, Yvonne Zacharias FOUNDERS - Ballard Lederer Gallery, Vancouver, 2003 RIDERS - Vortex Gallery, Salt Spring Island, 2002 |
THE ORDER OF THINGS - Mira Goddard, Toronto 2006
Gary Michael Dault – Gallery Going – Globe and Mail The Order of Things by Vancouver-based painter Deon Venter. The Order of Things by Vancouver-based painter Deon Venter is an exhibition of weighty, brawny, heavily textured paintings into which are scored decisive grids and stripes – an authoritative muster of what may seem at first to be simply pleasingly minimal compositions, both severe and also, at the same time, strangely delicate and ethereal in their effect. If these compositions seem familiar, it’s because they actually are: About half of them are Venter’s reworking and representation of the ubiquitous commercial bar code. The other half are based on the artist’s compositional extrapolations from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Last Supper (1495-1497) For Venter, the bar code – which, according to his riveting notes on its history, was developed in the late 1940s – is both a source for “beautiful, minimal image revealing the language of modern culture and that of commerce” and, simultaneously, a more or less invisible identification and control mechanism which, while hiding in plain sight, can become the almost subliminally functioning means by which we can all be sorted and processed. The artist’s gridded Last Supper paintings – which is to say, paintings of the perspectival grid that informs the structure of the Leonardo Painting – are Venter’s powerful graphic meditations on what he refers to as “the spiritual sensibility that still emanates from this abstract composition”. Venter has accomplished something quite unusual in The Order of Things: He has found two powerful, interrelated ways to make minimalist abstractions, and has then proceeded it previously the dry lose using adjustable to further imbue them with a great deal of “impure” but passionately felt humanist conviction – that resides somewhere in the very bones of their construction. |