In The Garden Room…

Historically, paintings played the role of advertising. They existed to capture a way of life, a perspective on reality, a depiction of fantasy. Like traditional craft, content mattered more than style. But also like craft, painting’s method of production –the multitude of micro-decisions made along the way–caused a series of unintentional shifts. Recent history has seen art take on a multitude of forms, blurring boundaries by pulling craft, advertising, and design into its realm.

The works before us are not paintings of spaces or objects, but rather, they are paintings of print material depicting spaces and advertising objects. These are pictures of images – their content is the printed page. Their source material comes from print platforms for interior design and luxury goods. In some, the presence of an artwork blends into the background of an elite domestic realm, following an art-historical lineage tied to ‘Interior Painting’. In these cases, the paintings provide a history that could easily have been missed. They become historical documents poised to play a role in understanding our visual world. Rideout’s painterly intervention into his source imagery recontextualizes the depicted art objects as part of the Art Canon, cataloguing collections and ultimately lending them new meaning. He curates each image, choosing the ones best-suited for painting (look, fit, function). He considers the formal and metaphorical properties of each; appreciating them as an art form in their own right: art in print. This practice of selecting an image, examining it closely, considering its unique history of production, and creating a painting from that image, displays a conscious effort towards historicization.

Each page Rideout draws from possesses an aura of time – how the paper has been handled, where it was kept, who read it and why, how it ended up in the studio of a contemporary artist. Its content is embedded in the history of the printed page. And so, these paintings of images containing objects, these still lifes of a particular moment in time, are also objects themselves. It is ultimately the page that functions as still life, not the content of the page. We find ourselves in a room full of objects. Paint is their patina and the images are a patina of preciousness. Is the painting less precious if we discover it is only a representation? When does representation become precious in and of itself? Do we elevate an object by selecting it for representation, or is its preciousness more deeply tied to the physicality of real space and time?

Brian Rideout makes pictures about pictures. His work investigates contemporary images, sourced from print and online, for their art historical relevance, as a continuation of the history of painting and image production. Rideout’s works comprise a narrative of art, architecture, and object following an undulating cycle of definition, utility, and design, softly dramatizing the multiple registers that art has come to occupy and employ over time as a material thing wholly existing in the world. He is interested in art as document, as decoration, as ideological accessory, as technological or functional support.

Rideout (b. 1986) was the 2017 recipient of The Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts. He studied at Georgian College (Barrie, ON) and has recently had solo exhibitions at Parisian Laundry, AC Repair Co., and Georgian College. Recent group shows include ‘This Must be the Place’ at MKG127, Spring/Break Art Fair (NYC), Art Toronto (Toronto), ‘Unkempt’ at MAW (NYC), ‘Open House’ at Sleep Center (NYC),’The Agency of Acquaintances’ at Clint Roenisch Gallery (Toronto), and ‘Taking [A] Part’ at Mercer Union (Toronto).