Harold Klunder: 4 Paintings

Harold Klunder, Sun And Moon IV, 2008-2009, oil on linen, 114”x78”, courtesy Clint Roenisch.

By David Liss

During the rise of neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s, then Toronto painter Harold Klunder established a reputation as one of Canada’s leading figures of the era, with huge-scale, intensely colored, densely impasto paintings of imaginatively constructed forms that hovered at the cusp of figuration and abstraction. As the winds of fashion shifted in the early 1990s and painting had (again) slipped from favor, Klunder’s profile too was eclipsed by emerging trends and the onslaught of upcoming generations, although the strength and authenticity of his practice was never diminished. Within the last few years, however, a number of exhibitions at various institutions and commercial galleries across the country have once again thrust the now Montreal-based Klunder into the forefront of current Canadian painting. Given the consistency that he has sustained throughout his entire career, and the quality of recent exhibitions, including his latest at the Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto, many are now considering Klunder to be one of Canada’s best living painters. Looking at the work of any number of younger Canadian painters, his influence cannot be underestimated. His current work is vibrant, fresh and attuned to the pulse and relevancy of current global painting. If not for the confidence and maturity of his paint handling and a complex pictorial sophistication, viewers could not be faulted for assuming that these are the works of the next young hot-shot from Brooklyn or Berlin.

The exhibition in Roenisch’s intimate front-room space consists of 4 oil-on-linen paintings of equal size, 290×200cm, and all completed during 2008-09. It is a tight fit in the room mainly because of the intense, tightly compressed and barely containable power that these pictures evoke as they threaten to unravel and explode through the picture plane. They appear as a coherent group and indeed they all bear the same title, Sun and Moon, (I, II, III, IV), with the lighter-toned compositions alluding to the solar and the darker, the lunar. Clearly Klunder’s approach to painting is rooted in classical analogies between paint and the human condition. The subject matter too, as revealed through the titles, is associated with overarching issues related the dualities of existence; the sublime, the invisible and the inexplicable are viscerally conveyed through paint and matter. But this series does not feel antiquated at all. Currency and timeliness are evoked through a radiant urgency of line, color and form that unmistakably invokes our peripatetic era. Consistent within Klunder’s distinctive vocabulary, figures and faces, seemingly in perpetual motion and flux, weave in and out of complex layers of paint and form. Disorienting perspectives are created by jarring juxtapositions of thick passages and blobs of paint and thin washes and drips. Linear space and time are confounded. Truth and reality are not fixed but suspended between states of being and consciousness. The infinite possibilities of reinvention and the transformative potential of paint and perception are unleashed and vital in the hands of this master painter in his prime.

Clint Roenisch Gallery - Toronto
September 18 - October 26, 2009.

David Liss is the Chief Curator of Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto.

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