Dennis Geden

" My first encounter with Geden's paintings was during a 1994 exhibition at Redpath Gallery in Vancouver. In my review of that show for The Georgia Straight I noted "there is a nice complexity to Dennis Geden's paintings, a niceness that comes from the blandly affable literalness of his portraits of children and historical figures, and a complexity that becomes more and more apparent as you discover there are multiple entry points into the imagined worlds they inhabit."

In a subsequent interview with Geden, I learned that some of my sense of uncertainty about his work was due to his use of a double perspective. He paints his figures at eye-level, looking straight at the face and, simultaneously, as if he could see through the figure's eyes looking down at the ground. The result is an unsettling viewpoint, hovering on the edge of spatial disorientation but held down by the rationalism of his diagrammatic blocking and unfussy surfaces.

In the catalogue accompanying the Go Figure exhibition, curator Donald C Scott describes Geden's work habits: "Geden typically begins the creation of an oil paintings with a series of small drawings and watercolours. Working with numerous sketches, he adds, subtracts and combines elements until the idea of the subject jells. Then, choosing a canvas, he tapes paper over the entire surface and begins a large scale version of the small drawing. By cutting and taping and adding fresh layers of paper, all elements in the composition are malleable. The position of the feet and arms, the tilt of the head, the background elements, even the angle of perspective might change numerous times until he is satisfied with the composition. Then, like a Renaissance cartoon, the drawing is carefully traced onto the canvas and the work with pigment is begun."

As a working process, his composition technique bears some resemblance to Alex Colville's scrupulously methodical approach, but Geden dismisses any suggestion that he has been directly influenced by Colville, Christopher Pratt, Ken Danby, or other artists working in the Canadian realist tradition. His devotion to figurative painting goes back to an early, perhaps iconoclastic decision to go it alone.

Geden was born and raised in North Bay, Ontario, where individualism and imagination are necessary strategies for survival. Although his art training and travels have periodically taken him away from home, his artistic vision has matured in the relative isolation of a northern mining town, away from art world trends. When he graduated in 1966 from Sir George Williams School of Art in Montreal, representational figurative paintings was decidedly outre. Ironically, thirty years later, figurative painting is once again fashionable, furnishing a language for gender issues, feminism, and the body as political zone.

"I like the subject to seem to have arrived from somewhere. If the suspended image started moving it would carry on to somewhere else. The painting works best when the viewer sees this also, and can sense the feeling of time, with infinity on either side," Geden explained in the artist's statement for his first London exhibition at Canada House. Critic Beatrice Phillpotts, writing for Art Review magazine about that 1984 exhibition, obliquely noted Geden's ability to disconcert. "A teasing ambiguous edge is a central ingredient of Geden's work and it combines with the ugly humanoid aspect of the figures to make the paintings uncomfortably compulsive," Phillpott commented.

I would dispute Phillpott's un-beautiful assessment of Geden's almost genderless bodies. Instead of considering them in terms of actual human representation, I suggest they be interpreted as pragmatic, conciliatory and ultimately very Canadian images - of seeing from both sides and passing judgement on neither."

Dr Edward Gibson, Director of the Simon Fraser Gallery, offers a more poetic evaluation: "There seems to be not one narrative but a range of stories, some real, and some surreal that we may read into the picture space. Yet, the narratives are not arranged as they are in the typical post-modern work of art: that is, they are not layered in a hierarchy designed for both elite and popular viewers. His images are more enigmatic than that; their meaning is constantly shifting, shifting the way that meanings shift when we attempt to verbalize a dream."

Paula Gustafson, 1996.

Extract from "Dennis Geden Go Figure - 30 year retrospective exhibition - toured to 6 venues in Canada from May 1996 to July 1997.