Don Jean-Louis: All Things Being Equal / Nights of the Qualicum

October 19 to November 18, 2001

Don Jean-Louis was born in Hull, Quebec in 1937. He has been exhibiting in Canada and internationally since 1960, and most recently (2001) in a three-person exhibition at the Douglas Udell Gallery in Vancouver, and in a group exhibition at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, Australia. Jean-Louis is represented in many public collections in Canada including the National Gallery; Art Gallery of Ontario; University of Toronto Art Centre; MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen's University, Kingston; Vancouver Art Gallery; and Musée d'art contemporain. In 1978 he was madea member of the Royal Canadian Academy. Based in Toronto for many years, Jean-Louis has lived on the east side of Vancouver Island since 1996, a location that has provided him with a new and important source of inspiration. 

The exploration of new media and technologies is a hallmark of Jean-Louis' practice, always within a directed and coherent vision. In the mid-1960s he created vacuum-formed uvex and neon objects; staged one of the first interactive video installations in Canada in 1969; and beginning in the 1970s, worked with transformative installations, painting, photography, and digital images. Jean-Louis has also created two major permanent public art works for the Government of Canada, Joseph Sheppard Building in North York (a neon and cloth site-responsive work originally installed in 1976 and reconstructed in 1999), and an aluminum sculptural work for the atrium of the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, installed in 1993. 

The Reynolds Gallery exhibition focuses on new work, monotypes and small-scale paintings, which have a resonance to early 1960s "metaphysical" drawings and "drawn" paintings of nature closely observed. On the one hand, the subject matter can be seen as an inventory or private journal of cell-like structures, related "minutiae," and the collective, shared phenomena of sky and water that is particular to Vancouver Island. Concurrently, the work reflects Jean-Louis' career-long interest in the "appearance" of things -- what appears to the eye and how it is understood, and how "things" and "appearances" can be transformed by the artist's mind, and hand. These transformations may take an abstracted form -- as one work is compared to another -- or the image and composition may sit on the cusp of identification. The objective for Don Jean-Louis is not, however, the sleight of hand, nor ambiguity for its own sake, but to record what is seen, and what is thought. (The venerable artist, gallery director and educator Anita Aarons often remarked that animals make footprints and human beings make 'thinkprints'.) 

Jean-Louis' titles also play an important role in exploring "appearances". His Joseph Sheppard Building commission, as one example, is titled Neon beyond sail on, are gone: a reference to the material and medium (neon and argon); the metaphor of sailing in his use of large sections of sailcloth-like material; the contrapuntal puns, "neon" becoming "beon"; and the poetic allusion to life, "as the ship sails on." His (year) 2000 monotypes were given the series title, All Things Being Equal, and subtitled Cell Life, with corresponding "inventory" numbers. 

An historically-rooted medium, monotypes are a new undertaking for the artist, although he did produce some monotypes in the early 1960s.

Cell Life 00201 DUG 10747 (detail) monotype on BFK R Wh.

A Selected of 70, (detail) Acrylic on black cardboard.

Cell Life 000219.DUG10765.1999 (detail) monotype on BFK R Wh.

Fresh Water Pearls for Anna, 2000, acrylic on canvas.

DON JEAN-LOUIS
by Julian Rowan

Materials in the hands of most artists are used to render  an image as some kind of representation of the world at large:  that representation is sometimes drawn from an artists' inner imagery, imagination, and fantasies.  The same materials in the hands of Don Jean-Louis have less  to do with rendering an image than with discovering and drawing a relationship to the subject matter, which in this case is both the ocean and water itself.

Living and working -- overlooking the waters  -- at Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island, Don Jean-Louis found himself observing and studying the ocean's ceaseless activities. The traces of what the breaking waves left behind. The myriad grains of sand and polished pebbles.  The flotsam and jetsam of little things.  The minutiae of marine life.  And perhaps above all, the seen and the unseen dynamics of water's character and workings: the waves, the splashes and flecks of water and foams.  The drips, the droplets.  The Drops!  The shaping and the reshaping.  All of which forever enfold and unfold on the sea's shifting shorelines.

Jean-Louis also became interested in the properties of a water-based ink. His concerns with the nature of liquid flow, ocean waves, patterns and more particularly, with the nature and properties of H2O, have led him to some interesting reflections and contemplations about WATER as subject matter and as material.  These have been mutual interests and ideas that have been exchanged over our near-40 year association.  Concurrently, this writer has used WATER and its tetrahedral molecular structure -- in teaching and publications  from the 1970s and 1980s -- as a constant metaphoric link to some of the broader issues in contemporary art and science with respect to 'spatial order' across the spectrum of natural phenomena. FT.1

With regard to the exhibition works, Don Jean-Louis commented that, with most  [monotypes] --- "I lend a little of myself and a small degree of 'persuasiveness' to influence the rate of evaporation of fluid materials to articulate their formations and 'colorations' on a paper ground.  There is in these works also, an expression of the interest in life and nature's activities where the ocean and land meet;  where cycles
constantly end and new ones begin." 

He reflects further about the awareness and concerns he has for the responsible and ethical use of technologies. In the hands of sensitive and inquiring artistic minds seeking to use technology for their own creative purposes, the rare and subtle configurations revealed in complex technical or scientific information."  FT.2

He elaborates, "technology can be on the one hand, the use of a wooden stick  burnt to a charcoal end and used to make drawings or markings, or it can be an electron microscope interfaced with a mathematically integrated software and coupled with an animation program. At this time I prefer an old technology [the hand pulled printing press],  and a newly developed technology, water-based ink.  The ramifications are wide and engaging and positive."

In 1964, Don Jean-Louis attended a conference at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, to listen to the American architect, designer and visionary, Buckminster Fuller.  What Fuller said at that gathering made an impression on the artist, which is with him to this day. Another inspirational figure for Jean-Louis at that time was the artist, educator, founder and director (1968 - 1974) of MIT's Centre for Advanced Visual Studies, Gyorgy Kepes, with whom this writer was privileged to study in 1969 -1970.  Kepes' publications include The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956) and the Vision and Value Series (1965 - 1967); published by George Braziller, N.Y. Today, with the development of sophisticated communications technologies, the world of the New Landscape has greater visibility, and its interests continue to grow in a global context.

FT.1 The regular tetrahedron is the first and simplest  (and strongest) straight-edged figure in three-dimensional space.  (It is made up of four equilateral triangular faces). The equilateral triangle  (with three equal lengthened edges ) is the first and simplest (and strongest) regular figure in two-dimensional space.

FT.2 Some philomorphs - those who study and model 'form generation according to nature's rules' (and this writer is one of these) reject western ideas about human and especially science/technology attempts at the 'domination and control' of nature.  Some teach and work with visual/verbal materiel, hoping to express and serve a deeper imperative:  'to learn how to work co-operatively' with nature.

Footnotes from JULIAN ROWAN, "Tetrahedron Modeling: Art/Science Metaphors for Order in Space", Leonardo the Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Volume 17 Number 4 1984, Pergamon Press: p.253-260

Julian Rowan was a partner in the firm of Dudas, Kuypers Rowan, Toronto -- industrial designers and among many national and international projects, were contributors to the Expo '67.  Rowan lives at Maple Bay, on Vancouver Island.

Exhibition images

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