John Eisler: we love you / join us!
June 25 to October 12, 2008
As an abstract painter, John Eisler embraces and celebrates the space of contingency. For the past two years, Eisler has engaged the process of creation as his subject. He establishes a methodology and then sets out to explore its potential. His finished paintings reveal a history of manipulations. Eisler’s objective is to distance himself from the work, in order to redefine his relationship to it: a space that is intricate and estranged.
The exhibition we love you / join us! featured Eisler’s six-foot by eight-foot stain paintings on raw, canvas. To create each painting, Eisler stretched the canvas on a three-by-six-foot frame, fastened to a table, limiting him to working on only forty percent of the canvas at a time. Eisler experiments by folding the canvas onto itself and applying the paint through multiple layers, which allows him to paint on both sides of a single canvas. Eisler also inscribes the canvas with geometric configurations, identifying the locations on the canvas where paint will be applied. The canvas is then saturated with water and allowed to dry. This process can be repeated up nine times in the creation of one painting.
The repetition of Eisler’s process results in a distorted representation of space, while simultaneously hinting at how the paintings are made. For example, Eisler staples his canvas to fix it to the three-by-six-foot frame. At each permutation of the process, he staples and re-staples the canvas. The staple marks inscribe the physical act — the making of the painting — into the finished work, as evidence and aesthetics.
John Eisler studied painting at the Alberta College of Art and Design (BFA 1997) and at the University of Guelph (MFA 2008). He has exhibited regularly since 1997. Selected group exhibitions include The Painting Machine curated by Arlene Stamp for The New Gallery (Calgary) and Picture Windows: New Abstraction curated by David Garneau (Calgary). He has also exhibited with Birch Libralato (Toronto). Eisler is represented by Paul Kuhn Fine Arts (Calgary).
Images:
Untitled, 2008 (stain painting, installation view, detail)
Untitled, 2008 (stain painting, installation view, detail)
Untitled, 2008 (stain painting, installation view, detail)