Ornaminimalism

Laurel Smith – The Minimalist

(RBC Canadian Painting Competition Ten Years)

by Catherine Crowston, Deputy Director/Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta

It could be said that Calgary artist Laurel Smith paints contradiction, bringing together seemingly oppositional ideas and diverse perceptual experiences. Her work engages both the idea of painting and the history of its conceptual polemics. Surface and field, image and object, representation and abstraction, reduction and ornamentation, material and immateriality all come together in her practice.

Smith directly references the history of Minimalist painting through a reduction of the work to its fundamental features and through her use of the object as a point of reference for painting. Her work, like that of her Minimalist predecessors, inhabits a space that is not easily classifiable as either painting or sculpture. It deals, rather, with the materiality of painting and the conceptual and physical boundaries that have traditionally separated it from sculpture.

The edges, corners and backs of Smith's works are as integral to their perception as the front. She relies on the perceptual effects created by three-dimensionality; cast shadow, reflected light and spatial depth. In her 2002 series Faceted, for example, she applied coloured paint to the back surface of the work only – the front face revealed a plane of flat white. The irregularly-shaped canvases stand out from the wall and our experience of their colour is created by the reflection of light against the wall on which the paintings hang. There is an astonishing sense of emanation from these works, of a space behind the surfaces that reinforces their dimensionality and physical presence.

While colour has been an important factor in Smith's work, her paintings are not about specific colours, but about how colour emphasizes structure, how it reveals edges, depth, materiality and the work's presence in 3-dimensional space. As in Minimalist architecture, we see the connection between planes, the effect of light on surfaces and the delineation of shape, both positive and negative.

References to Minimalism can also be seen in Smith's use of industrial materials, specifically in her incorporation of plexiglass and aluminum as supporting structures. At the same time, however, she asserts the hand-made quality of her surfaces. Laboriously constructed through the application of layer upon layer of coloured glaze, these surfaces are marked with smudges, smears and drips. On close examination they are fields that emphasize mark-making, layering and finishing. In the Kerf series of 2006 thin layers of coloured glaze were applied to sheets of clear plexiglass in varying degrees of transparency and opacity. In some cases, bare areas of plexiglass seem to sneak out from beneath the paint, extending the support of the work beyond the painted surface. Once again, our perception of these works is based on a subtle recognition of the spatial effect of coloured reflections that bounce off white walls or are seen through the transparent plexiglass edges.

In more recent years, Smith has created works that blend the excessive ornamentation of Rococo with the reductive simplicity of Minimalism, referencing two historical styles that are diametrically opposed. In a body of work which she calls Ornaminimalism, the artist collapses the minimal and the ornate. This most recent work arises out of the artist's interest in examining the excessive detailing of 18th century design, in particular the shell-like curves, botanical detailing and curvilinear forms of Rococo gilt frames and furniture. Here again, Smith stresses the hand-make quality of the surfaces with built-up layers of glaze, and, once again, the wall is an active component of the work. In this case, each work is a diptych, with two laser-cut aluminum panels hung apart from each other so that the wall surface between them becomes a third element, a void space that is seemingly left behind by their separation. Yet, on closer examination it is clear that the two halves never formed a whole.

The experience of Smith's paintings is at once meditative and enchanting. They are slow works that one must appreciate over many moments, not in an instant, like watching the play of sunlight or the slow amassing of shadows.

Laurel Smith, Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary

Review by Mireille Perron, Canadian Art

Laurel Smith's paintings question excess, finding parallels between our contemporary society of overabundance and the 18th-century rococo style. She has coined the term "Ornaminimalism" to describe the combined references to rococo ornamentation and minimalism in her work.

The paintings themselves are based on a motif appropriated from a decorative rococo picture frame. Smith repeats the motif in fragmented form on supports of laser-cut aluminum and Plexiglas of varying sizes. The swirls and curls of the rococo shapes cast shadows within paintings that otherwise keep their hard edges and rectangular shape: The monarchy of the minimal, for instance, adheres to the modernist tenet that a painting is above all a flat, rectilinear surface fastened to the wall at eye level. The colourful and luminous surfaces of Smith's works are carefully crafted, built from up to 20 successive layers of acrylic paint. In some paintings, such as Bon vivant, Uberous and Voluptuary, the painted layers accumulate like geological strata in the recesses created by the curling shape of the original motif.

As a style, rococo was known for its aristocratic abandon. Smith takes the title of Après nous, le deluge ("after me, the deluge") from an expression attributed to the 18th century French courtesan Madame de Pompadour, who reportedly laughed off all criticism of her extravagance with the eponymous phrase. Smith believes that today's society of excessive consumption and disposable goods is driven by a similar careless destructiveness.

Smith has provided an elegant solution to the question of excess by confining rococo extravagance and her abundantly worked surfaces to austere, industrially made panels. The French theorist Jacques Derrida would describe it as a situation in which excess is sous rature or "under erasure." The paintings put both of their characteristic elements—rococo excess and the reductivism of minimalism—into this zone of erasure. It is a reminder that the pleasures of excess cannot be simply disavowed and that the reductive purity of minimalism can be a dangerous illusion too. Instead, we are presented with innovative hybrids and invited to identify connections between past and present art practices.

The paintings' greatest resonance is to be found in those areas of built-up paint that lie within the recesses made by their surface patterning. The paint suggests a condition of being found in between—as it is with our times, which are likewise suspended between no longer and not yet.

Smith's Ornaminimalsm at Peak Gallery, Toronto

Review by Gary Michael Dault, Globe and Mail

With her new exhibition, the awkwardly though cleverly named ornaminimalism, Calgary artist Laurel Smith moves decisively away from the severely lonely, horizontal,wall-mounted, semi-minimalist acrylic-on-Plexiglas lozenges she showed last time out at Peak (I call them "semi-minimalist" only because their highly clarified shapes cast succulently tinted shadows on the gallery walls, shadows that were too luscious for the astringency of minimalist proper). For this current exhibition, she has embraced - almost perversely - a dalliance with the hyper-ornamentalism of the historical Rococo style.

Smith's horizontal Plexiglas lozenge is still there (the bigger works are made of lazercut aluminium), but now she has cut through them at some midway point and pulled the two halves apart. The cut edges are not, however clean cuts. On the contrary, the edges are fantastically ornate - a veritable hysteria of eddies and curlicues and introverted complex curves that seem to reference Rococo in its traditionally understood role as a purveyor of - as writer Christopher Willard puts it in the accompanying catalogue - "ideas of spirit, sensuous abandon, a carefree pursuit of pleasure, the fleeting nature of romantic love, and indulgent sensuality."

So why would Smith so decisively move from the modernist clarifications of her minimalist bars of painted Plexiglas to hacking them apart, leaving behind these berserk split ends that writhe out into the gap like candy-coloured tentacles? According to Willard, Smith is neither in retreat from minimalism nor fully in the unthinking embrace of Rococo excessiveness. Her work, he suggests, "reflects more than it critiques." All well and good, but what does it reflect and how? Mostly, I think it valorizes Smith's skill incorporating the idea of decoration into her work. It exemplifies the way she explores how much decoration she can add before the work heaves a sigh and grows ...well, decorative. And decadent. So far, Smith has been pretty circumspect in here playing of this delicately balanced game. But she's getting awfully close to the abyss.

LS is More at Peak Gallery, Toronto

Gary Michael Dault of Toronto’s Globe and Mail writes: "The works making up her wittily titled exhibition LS is More, the first Toronto solo show by this Calgary-based artist, are like horizontal slabs of gelatin: Thick but evanescent lozenges of saturated colour, the kind of colour that seems to be in perpetual suspension within its matrix. Smith says her slabs glow because of the up to 20 coats of acrylic paint applied to the sheet of Plexiglas that supports them. This buildup of pigment, thicker than anything you'd comfortably refer to as "coats" of pigment, results in the kind of sweet, slick surfaces you associate with the hand-rubbed, infinitely deep, glossy, tangerine-flake surfaces of custom cars. Adding to this deep effulgence, is the fact that Smith bevels some of the edges of her paintings (the paintings all bear the generic title Kerf, which means "the cut or the width of a cut made with an axe saw or cutting tool"), usually the tops or one of the sides. She paints these bevelled edges in an alternate colour from the painting's surface, so that when the gallery lights are trained upon the pictures, you get an attractive flair of extra colour thrown up on the wall. Each little painting (they are all only 20 cm by 61 cm) is thus a veritable riot of performative colour: Less is more and, in Smith's hands, less is luscious.”

The More and the Less of Laurel Smith

Review by Monika Burman, Mass Art Guide

There is a more and a less to the work of Laurel Smith. The more is about extending Minimalism into the 21st century. The less (or LS) of Laurel Smith is about her new show, LS is More, at Peak Gallery through February 19th, 2006.

American Painter Frank Stella famously characterized the Minimalist art movement with the phrase "What you see, is what you see". Minimalism is typically defined by its reductive style, reducing a work of art to the minimum number of colors, values, shapes, lines and textures. Beginning with the Russian Constructivists at the turn of the 20th century, the Minimalist movement grew roots in the West in the 1960's. The stripped down, elemental, fundamental style creates immediate visual impact without any particular representational form. Smith's new body of work extends the Minimalist concept into today's digital age of excess. As Smith herself says, "I believe that minimal painting today is more vibrant and relevant than ever before".

The LS of More series is based on pantone colors, each with a unique formulation suggested by reductive titles like "Kerf 1234C230C:812". The paintings are presented as large rectangular color-chips; linear bands of color that stretch beyond the borders of the canvas by emitting an intense halo when installed. Each work seems to have an inner light source, seeming to float on the wall, even as the depth of color brings a weighty quality to the paintings.

The radiance and glow of Smith's painted surfaces comes from a process of layering over 20 glazes onto plesiglas. The subtle fades, blur and wear of each glaze on top of the other create the richness in simplistic form identified with Minimalism, and certainly a characteristic of Smith's work.

Laurel Smith is a 2005 Canada Council award winner, having studies at Concordia University and the Alberta College of Art and Design. Her work is held in notable public and private collections including the Visby Kunst Museum, Sweden; Glenbow Museum, Calgary Canada; RBC Investments, Toronto, Canada; and the University of Calgary, Canada. She lives and works in Calgary Alberta where she was born.