CRG is pleased to present a much-anticipated exhibition of new paintings by Dorian FitzGerald (b. 1975, lives Toronto). The artist's last exhibition with the gallery in 2022 subsequently travelled to Arsenal Contemporary in New York.
Plunder and greed, nobility and money, deceit and desire, subterfuge and schemes, salons and courts, bastions and black markets, hubris and downfall, the antique and the modern, the geological and the cosmic, all of these are points of contact with FitzGerald's works. An early painting, now in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts collection, depicts the Throne Room of the Queluz National Palace in Sintra, Portugal. Cradle of kings, refuge of queens, the room is shorn of life, embalmed in a saturated amber hue. Dazzling at first glance the painting also lays bare the colonial lust for gold, much of which came plundered from Brazil. Another large painting, now in the Sobey Collection, shows the walk-in closet of sunglasses kept by Elton John at his sprawling estate in Old Windsor, UK, a buffet of shape-shifting signifiers each waiting to be picked for the next grand tour. Yet another depicts the former Parisian salon of Valerian Rybar, once known as the world's most expensive decorator. The room is entirely mirrored so as to more fully reflect his exquisite taste, except he has died, and the listing has just gone up and the realtor's camera flash is visible to the left of a fireplace gone cold. Dust to dust. There is a small painting from 2019 of a fake crown of costume jewelry, made by the British to impress and dupe the King of Adra to help grease their slave trade. Yet another painting shows a performance of Faust - of all plays - in the Bohemian Grove, the fabled gathering place of world leaders and so-called titans of industry, out of the prying eyes of media and Congress, where the levers of power can be pulled without oversight. The list goes on. The dining room of Stefano Gabbana's yacht. A fake Giacometti. A blackamoor sculpture in Coco Chanel's apartment. An aquarium overflowing with black market fish. A blood diamond encrusted Noble Order Of The Garter with its warning set in red gemstones: "Honi Soi Qui Mal y Pense" (Evil to him who evil thinks). Coursing through the last two decades of FitzGerald's paintings, underneath their often astounding surfaces, are subtle blue veins of incrimination and indictment. FitzGerald understands his position. It is by turns forensic, critical, sensitive and drawn to excesses. With his painstaking process he depicts real places, events and people that intrigue him, often for the socio-economic counterpoint they represent. The paintings show that he questions the unsavoury, is attracted to the quixotic, and hopeful for more just outcomes. FitzGerald's work is a mesmerizing archive of other people's dreams, vanities and predilections, their audacious machinations and bequests, of how reliably does absolute power corrupt absolutely. Down through the generations, as sure as spring follows winter and from the manure come forth lillies, we witness in his paintings the human propensity for folly and yearning, for pomposity and guile. We see erected the most sumptuous of fleeting scaffolds. Temples of want. The composting of royals who once smugly waved from the balconies. Malcolm Forbes with his huge custom balloon in the exact shape of his chateau in France, sailing it low over the trees on a gust of compounding yield, while everyone else is stuck on the ground looking up with their mouths open. Just as the Goncourt brothers famously chronicled 19th century Parisian society in their 22 volume Journal, FitzGerald has always painted with a critical eye.
And yet, for this new show, the painting that anchors the grouping is perhaps FitzGerald's most personal of the last decade. It is a faithful rendering of the Old Holland paint rack from Aboveground Art Supplies, that bodega of dreams adjacent to the Ontario College of Art. FitzGerald worked there as a young man and sold tubes from it every shift. One could imagine the paint rack diptych as a self-portrait, a Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. Just as Dedalus gradually frees himself from societal constraints to become a writer in Joyce's book, FitzGerald was at a crossroads at Aboveground. The paint rack was like a lodestar, and from it he rightly chose the more difficult route, the rocky path of an artist. On a formal level the painting acts like an MRI that reveals FitzGerald's abiding interest in adhering to a system to convey the right amount of information, resolution and mood. His paintings are always born from order, parsing and deliberation. We see the careful arrangement and deploying of pigments, the attention to detail, the faithfulness and dedication, the years of toil. It all comes back to painting. FitzGerald himself, however, sees it as more of an archaeological exercise. He writes that "the histories of the pigments are woven into, are indistinguishable from, the whole of human history, with ochres and siennas on cave walls, minerals collected, mined, hoarded and exchanged along the very first trade routes, extracted from exploitative labour or directly from animals - synthetic pigments being invented, either intentionally or, just as likely, accidentally while in the pursuit of some other industrial (or military) end." A related painting depicts various gems and minerals in their found state. The painting makes the link, Dorian writes, "between the processed pigments in their tubes and their raw origins, more explicit. The title of the show, Epoch, refers both to human historical periods that gave rise to the pigments' histories of use and discovery - and also to the radically larger geological timescales that dwarf our own brief period of existence, allowing for the accretion of material and energies required to create the rocks, crystals, minerals that we then use to decorate."
"The smaller works and photographs continue that meditation on history and timescales, while linking to some of my earlier concerns about the economics of collecting. There is an Australopithecine skull, a primate ancestor that became extinct two million years ago, as well as a stone head from our early modern history, eight thousand years ago, sold at auction. Also from auction catalogs - a meteorite that fell into the Sahara after piercing the atmosphere at exactly the right angle to resist tumbling, and an example of a gogotte - a 30 million year old sandstone concretion, long prized for their sinuous and organic shapes. There is a broccoli romanesco, a cultivar whose fractal form hints at the organizing principles underlying the universe, and a painting of the moon. There is also an earlier Hubble photograph of the Orion Nebula, which serves not only as another reminder of scale, but also as evidence of some of our best qualities - globally shared results, from one of the most ambitious science projects ever undertaken - qualities under threat that need to be protected and nurtured for our continued existence."
Dorian FitzGerald completed his Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at Sheridan/University of Toronto Mississauga in 2001. The exhibition Dorian FitzGerald: Fitzcarraldo (Clint Roenisch Gallery, 2022) travelled to Arsenal Contemporary, New York in 2023, A selection of his exhibitions in public galleries include Are You Experienced at Art Gallery of Hamilton (2015); The Painting Project - Galerie de l'UQAM, Montreal (2013); Quebec and Canadian Art, 1980-2010: New Acquisitions, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2011); Empire of Dreams: Phenomenology of the Built Environment, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); Carte Blanche: Volume 2 - Painting, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2008)
Plunder and greed, nobility and money, deceit and desire, subterfuge and schemes, salons and courts, bastions and black markets, hubris and downfall, the antique and the modern, the geological and the cosmic, all of these are points of contact with FitzGerald's works. An early painting, now in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts collection, depicts the Throne Room of the Queluz National Palace in Sintra, Portugal. Cradle of kings, refuge of queens, the room is shorn of life, embalmed in a saturated amber hue. Dazzling at first glance the painting also lays bare the colonial lust for gold, much of which came plundered from Brazil. Another large painting, now in the Sobey Collection, shows the walk-in closet of sunglasses kept by Elton John at his sprawling estate in Old Windsor, UK, a buffet of shape-shifting signifiers each waiting to be picked for the next grand tour. Yet another depicts the former Parisian salon of Valerian Rybar, once known as the world's most expensive decorator. The room is entirely mirrored so as to more fully reflect his exquisite taste, except he has died, and the listing has just gone up and the realtor's camera flash is visible to the left of a fireplace gone cold. Dust to dust. There is a small painting from 2019 of a fake crown of costume jewelry, made by the British to impress and dupe the King of Adra to help grease their slave trade. Yet another painting shows a performance of Faust - of all plays - in the Bohemian Grove, the fabled gathering place of world leaders and so-called titans of industry, out of the prying eyes of media and Congress, where the levers of power can be pulled without oversight. The list goes on. The dining room of Stefano Gabbana's yacht. A fake Giacometti. A blackamoor sculpture in Coco Chanel's apartment. An aquarium overflowing with black market fish. A blood diamond encrusted Noble Order Of The Garter with its warning set in red gemstones: "Honi Soi Qui Mal y Pense" (Evil to him who evil thinks). Coursing through the last two decades of FitzGerald's paintings, underneath their often astounding surfaces, are subtle blue veins of incrimination and indictment. FitzGerald understands his position. It is by turns forensic, critical, sensitive and drawn to excesses. With his painstaking process he depicts real places, events and people that intrigue him, often for the socio-economic counterpoint they represent. The paintings show that he questions the unsavoury, is attracted to the quixotic, and hopeful for more just outcomes. FitzGerald's work is a mesmerizing archive of other people's dreams, vanities and predilections, their audacious machinations and bequests, of how reliably does absolute power corrupt absolutely. Down through the generations, as sure as spring follows winter and from the manure come forth lillies, we witness in his paintings the human propensity for folly and yearning, for pomposity and guile. We see erected the most sumptuous of fleeting scaffolds. Temples of want. The composting of royals who once smugly waved from the balconies. Malcolm Forbes with his huge custom balloon in the exact shape of his chateau in France, sailing it low over the trees on a gust of compounding yield, while everyone else is stuck on the ground looking up with their mouths open. Just as the Goncourt brothers famously chronicled 19th century Parisian society in their 22 volume Journal, FitzGerald has always painted with a critical eye.
And yet, for this new show, the painting that anchors the grouping is perhaps FitzGerald's most personal of the last decade. It is a faithful rendering of the Old Holland paint rack from Aboveground Art Supplies, that bodega of dreams adjacent to the Ontario College of Art. FitzGerald worked there as a young man and sold tubes from it every shift. One could imagine the paint rack diptych as a self-portrait, a Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. Just as Dedalus gradually frees himself from societal constraints to become a writer in Joyce's book, FitzGerald was at a crossroads at Aboveground. The paint rack was like a lodestar, and from it he rightly chose the more difficult route, the rocky path of an artist. On a formal level the painting acts like an MRI that reveals FitzGerald's abiding interest in adhering to a system to convey the right amount of information, resolution and mood. His paintings are always born from order, parsing and deliberation. We see the careful arrangement and deploying of pigments, the attention to detail, the faithfulness and dedication, the years of toil. It all comes back to painting. FitzGerald himself, however, sees it as more of an archaeological exercise. He writes that "the histories of the pigments are woven into, are indistinguishable from, the whole of human history, with ochres and siennas on cave walls, minerals collected, mined, hoarded and exchanged along the very first trade routes, extracted from exploitative labour or directly from animals - synthetic pigments being invented, either intentionally or, just as likely, accidentally while in the pursuit of some other industrial (or military) end." A related painting depicts various gems and minerals in their found state. The painting makes the link, Dorian writes, "between the processed pigments in their tubes and their raw origins, more explicit. The title of the show, Epoch, refers both to human historical periods that gave rise to the pigments' histories of use and discovery - and also to the radically larger geological timescales that dwarf our own brief period of existence, allowing for the accretion of material and energies required to create the rocks, crystals, minerals that we then use to decorate."
"The smaller works and photographs continue that meditation on history and timescales, while linking to some of my earlier concerns about the economics of collecting. There is an Australopithecine skull, a primate ancestor that became extinct two million years ago, as well as a stone head from our early modern history, eight thousand years ago, sold at auction. Also from auction catalogs - a meteorite that fell into the Sahara after piercing the atmosphere at exactly the right angle to resist tumbling, and an example of a gogotte - a 30 million year old sandstone concretion, long prized for their sinuous and organic shapes. There is a broccoli romanesco, a cultivar whose fractal form hints at the organizing principles underlying the universe, and a painting of the moon. There is also an earlier Hubble photograph of the Orion Nebula, which serves not only as another reminder of scale, but also as evidence of some of our best qualities - globally shared results, from one of the most ambitious science projects ever undertaken - qualities under threat that need to be protected and nurtured for our continued existence."
Dorian FitzGerald completed his Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at Sheridan/University of Toronto Mississauga in 2001. The exhibition Dorian FitzGerald: Fitzcarraldo (Clint Roenisch Gallery, 2022) travelled to Arsenal Contemporary, New York in 2023, A selection of his exhibitions in public galleries include Are You Experienced at Art Gallery of Hamilton (2015); The Painting Project - Galerie de l'UQAM, Montreal (2013); Quebec and Canadian Art, 1980-2010: New Acquisitions, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2011); Empire of Dreams: Phenomenology of the Built Environment, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); Carte Blanche: Volume 2 - Painting, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2008)
