Over the course of a single weekend, three gallery openings across Toronto revealed vastly different approaches to image making, atmosphere, and the human figure. Moving between the polished energy of Yorkville, the quieter experimental spaces of Richmond Street, and the conceptual atmosphere of a photography gallery reception, the experience felt less like viewing isolated exhibitions and more like encountering three distinct artistic languages unfolding simultaneously across the city.
At Liss Gallery in Yorkville, the work of Todd White embraced much spectacle. The gallery opening carried the energy of a social event as much as an exhibition offering a welcoming and generous spread and refreshments to sharply dressed attendees moving through the room filled with exaggerated figures, nightlife imagery, cocktails, musicians, and caricatured expressions. White’s paintings exist somewhere between satire and glamour, presenting social scenes that feel theatrical, performative, and intentionally artificial. Faces stretch unnaturally, gestures become exaggerated, and expressions capture cartoonish distortion like that of the low brow pop surrealism of the 1950’s.
Some paintings could be viewed as salacious and over-sexualized depending on the viewers perspective and tolerance for exaggerated glamour aesthetics.
Yet, beneath the humour and polish is an awareness of performance itself. The figures appear less like portraits of individuals and more like embodiments of social personas people performing versions of themselves within upscale interiors and carefully curated environments showcasing luxury and exclusivity. The opening mirrored this atmosphere in an almost self referential way, blurring the line between artwork and audience. Like the title of his book the devil is very much in the details.
A very different emotional register emerged at Remote Gallery A during People in the City, a solo exhibition by Pierre St-Jacques organized by Station Independent Projects. Where White’s work amplifies personality and spectacle, St-Jacques moves in the opposite direction, reducing figures to fragments, silhouettes, and dissolving forms blending together expertly.
Several works appeared suspended between appearance and disappearance, with human figures emerging faintly through washes of colour and partially obstructed surfaces. In conversation during the opening, St-Jacques spoke about an interest in reduction and ambiguity an attempt to avoid over-explaining an image or forcing it into a rigid narrative structure. At one point, he reflected on the idea of “how little can I show,” a phrase that seems central to the exhibition’s visual language.
That restraint gives the work much of its emotional force. Rather than constructing fully defined scenes, the paintings operate through atmosphere and suggestion. Figures become transient presences drifting through urban space, carrying traces of memory, emotion, and isolation. The openness of the imagery invites viewers to linger within uncertainty rather than search for definitive meaning. Untitled (Pandemic Painting) offers an almost Francis Bacon like quality in its technique and undertones. While Untitled (Forest Fire) Has a modernist approach again with an unsettling undertone that one may have trouble placing a finger on. St-Jacques is able to combine many striking elements onto canvas even considering how the canvas can be used to aid the process.
The final stop of the weekend, at Stephen Bulger Gallery, shifted further into conceptual and archival territory through exhibitions by Spring Hurlbut and Arnaud Maggs. Compared to the social theatricality of Liss Gallery and the emotional ambiguity of St-Jacques’ work, the atmosphere here was a mixture of the two. Both lively and reflective with a great turn out from guests. However, not all attendees were invited to the private area which seemed to hinder the overall welcome one may feel.
Hurlbut’s work, inspired in part by Hilma af Klint, explored cycles, mortality, and material transformation through photographic processes involving funerary ash. Nearby, selections from Arnaud Maggs’ archive presented systems of classification, repetition, portraiture, and documentation. One particularly uncanny image of a ventriloquist style dummy seemed to encapsulate the strange psychological tension running throughout the exhibition an object simultaneously humorous and unsettling, frozen somewhere between human presence and artificial construction.
The openings themselves also revealed strikingly different social atmospheres. At Liss Gallery in Yorkville, Toronto’s prominent art and fashion area food and drinks circulated with ease in an non judgemental, relaxed and generous manner and was even down to earth offering not only expensive cheeses and wine but also guilty pleasures such as McDonald’s hamburgers. Thus, reinforcing its social atmosphere. In comparison, the Stephen Bulgar Gallery felt more restrained and internally focused, with less emphasis placed on guest interaction. Still less, an interesting atmosphere.
