Saturday, December 13, 2008
Gallery Going Gary Michael Dault
Scott Wallis at the David Kaye Gallery
Scott Wallis’s delightful essays in minimalism trade much of classic
minimalism’s formal rigour for a more relaxed and more intimate display
of the pleasures of precision. Wallis’s tried-and-true format is the cleanly
cut aperture. Lifting careful squares and rectangles from fields of white
paper, Wallis then defines those austere cuts and openings with addition
of brief and subtle moments of animation at their new edges: rims and
outlines of painted colour, or the sudden appearance of short bars of
metal – brass, aluminum, steel. The result is invariably a kind of quiet
joy, whereby pure form is offered as an accessable, portable gift.
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Gallery Going Gary Michael Dault
Scott Wallis at Peak Gallery
The degree to which the works making up Scott Wallis’s exhibition
Depth of Field are chromatically spare and structurally severe,
positions them, somehow, as purely metaphysical objects. These
small, wall-mounted constructions, however tethered they may be
to the generation of commentary on the tenets of previous forms
of abstraction, are so breathtakingly clean, whole and fully resolved
on their own right that they are almost intimidating. Wallis may allude
to canonical minimalists such as Don Judd and Fred Sandback, but
you can feel the sheer joy the artist must have experienced in having
contrived so much clarity, so much visual declaration, for its own sake.
Wallis’s little colour- filled concavities in paper, his cut-out squares, edged
on their sides with cleanly installed linings of metal (copper, brass), his
almost aggressive open-ness of ambition for his constructions, make
for art objects that incorporate a charming sense of transcendence that
almost reads as the equivalent of moral superiority. Are these works,
in the end, better than we are?
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, February 13, 1999
Gallery Going Gary Michael Dault
Scott Wallis at the Edward Day Gallery
The handsome, minimalesque constructions of Kingston based
artist Scott Wallis are like informed glosses on classic, modernist art.
The paintings – I guess we can still call them paintings – are severe
geometries of alkyd enamel bands flawlessly applied to a support
of transparent material resembling high-end plastic wrap that is in
turn held slightly away from the wall by the wooden stretchers
underneath. A layering of absences, Wallis’s paintings become
a sandwich of assorted planes – the colour on the now dematerialized
canvas, the shallow film suspended before a wall, and, as Wallis observes,
“the shadow play of the coloured, opaque strips of pigment falling onto
the wall behind.” As sensuously satisfying as all this is, Wallis is after
bigger theoretical game. The painting-constructions, he maintains,
re-examine the delayed possibilities of modernist painting and revisit
the critical moment of minimalism when objecthood collapsed under
the weight of its own lucidity. Wallis’s paintings are, he argues,
a “positive apology for …Modernism’s capacity for self-renewal.”
They’re also indecently gorgeous.
