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Hamilton Arts & Letters
It is reassuring that the group of artists known once as The Young Contemporaries, now The Contemporaries, has remained together and its members strongly supportive of one another’s work as friends, peers and mentors. The crowded opening of their “reunion” exhibition on November 13 at you me gallery tapped into the burgeoning cultural energy of the Friday night Art Crawl along James North in Hamilton.
The buzz of this love-in seemed to spill out of the gallery into the street, many stepping outside the doors for a breath of fresh air apart from the sweaty interior. While the North end neighbourhood is experiencing a zeitgeist moment—it is the place to be, and the new chosen home of many Toronto artistic ex-pats—this exhibition was a wink and nod to some of the individuals who laid the foundation for this artistic community and who have remained committed to forging an artistic career in this gritty steel town during a period that spans four decades. One prominent painting in the exhibition by Paul Ropel-Morski called North End (1993) is prescient in its depiction of the hood as iconic subject matter.
The exhibition at you me gallery was a tight curation of early and recent works by the members of The Contemporaries including Fred Bilanzola, Judi Burgess, Raffaele Caterini, Paul Cvetich, John Kinsella, Janice Kovar, Paul Ropel-Morski and Lisa Wöhrle. An older work and a newer piece by each artist were shown adjacent to one another. While the majority of the group are painters, sculptures by Cvetich and Burgess were integrated into the install. The narrow gallery made for sightlines allowing one to glimpse shared interests and mutual influences amongst the group that have remained constant over the many years they have exhibited together. It was poignant to see a painting by the late Fred Bilanzola (who died in a car accident in 2001) posthumously included. Indeed, Bilanzola eloquently blends the group’s interest in representation and the human figure, but also in portraying the collision of spatial planes that is undoubtedly urban. Bilanzola’s strong allegorical narrative in Third World, This World (1990-91) ricochets off Kinsella’s The Raft (1995), Burgess’s Full Moon (1994) and Wöhrle’s Steve (1995), all earlier paintings.
[Distillate © HA&L + Stuart Reid {from the Greek bios} the course of a life.]
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