This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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Odon Wagner Contemporary is pleased to present our second solo exhibition of new work by Canadian contemporary artist John Ballantyne. Please join us for the Opening Reception of Silence and Light, on April 2 from 2-5pm. Artist will be in attendance.
“Music is constant. Listening is intermittant.” – John Cage. The same could be said for both looking and seeing and also for depicting our visions in the realm of painted images: looking is constant but actual seeing is only occasional. Paintings such as Ballantyne’s are invitations to a ritual of looking that engages our imaginations far above and below the apparently straightforward substance of the images represented. They are what they appear to be: placid architectural spaces, portraits of both interiors and exteriors, still life’s with rooms and buildings instead of fruits or flowers, designed and built landscapes at once tightly contained and yet fully open to conjecture.
As such they also aspire to be accurate diagrams of something impossible to behold, something which the poet Goethe once offered as an ideal definition of what architecture is and what it does: frozen music. In Ballantyne’s work we witness a certain kind of mathematical precision which is not strictly realistic per se but in fact actually arrives at quite a different destination: a metaphysical dwelling place for the frozen music of form and content. Another primary and recurring focus of his work is the frequent element of illuminated objects which remind of us of the original meaning of the word photo-graphis: drawing with light.
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