Additional Images

Provenance:

Paul Kuhn Fine Arts, Calgary, AB;
Private Collection, Calgary, AB

Note:

1989 was a pivotal year. The Berlin Wall fell, the horror of the Tiananmen Square protests unfolded, the first commercial Internet providers surfaced, and civil unions between same-sex partners were legalized in Denmark, the first in the world. "The Simpsons" first episode aired on Fox TV, Iran placed a $3,000,000 bounty on Salman Rushdie for the publication of his book "The Satanic Verses" and Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington was taken down.

As the world shifted so did Chris Cran’s practice: out of his ironic, anecdotal realist paintings, the "Self-Portrait Paintings," with their antihero protagonist and narratives derived from advertising, illustration and cartoons, often composed from set-up photographs, into his first forays into abstraction and a deeper investigation into the relationship of painting to photography, and how meaning is formed. The question of meaning and the drama of the relationship of the viewer to the object have been central to Cran’s practice since 1984.

"Yellow Men," 1989 is one of the first works from the Stripe Paintings that invites the viewer to pose the question: what does it mean? Can the mind entertain two things at the same time? As the viewer’s gaze slips back and forth between the drama of the implied internal space created by the stripes and the apparent flatness of the images appropriated from printed media, the paintings put forward a dramatic optical field that invites the viewer to travel between the two. That “traveling” is the work of the viewer, a notion that the artist has been interested in since the beginning: that the viewer does half the work in completing a work of art. As Chris Cran has often stated: “The viewer is not just experiencing the work, they are experiencing their reaction to the work.”

We thank Yves Trépanier, TrépanierBaer Gallery in Calgary, for contributing this essay.

According to the artist, "[...] the intention behind the work from this series was the discovery of light catching on the ridges of a brushstroke that was to be lit from one position (upper left or right of the painting). A brushstroke lit from one side appears either light or dark. As the viewer moves from left to right or right to left while viewing the painting, the "image" changes from a positive to a negative. This visual strategy makes it clear to the viewer that they too are very much an active participant in the making of the painting.”