GARY MICHAEL DAULT
Jakub Dolejs at Angell Gallery
$700-$12,000. Until June 17,
890 Queen St. W., Toronto;
416-530-0444
Tribune, by Toronto-based Czech artist Jakub Dolejs at the city's Angell Gallery, is an odd and heady amalgam of the resources and possibilities of photography and painting as they overlap, interrelate and confound one another.
At the centre of the exhibition are two enormous lambda prints (photographic prints that are imaged directly from digital files) that are both titled Tribune and are both photographs of nearly the same subject: a painting by 18th-century German-born artist Johan Zoffany (1733-1810). Well, let's say, speaking more specifically, that a painting by Johan Zoffany lies at the heart of the splendid, crowded and panoramic images that now anchor Dolejs's exhibition.
The original painting, titled The Tribune of the Uffizi, dates from some time between 1772 and 1778, and shows about half of an octagonal room in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, which, stuffed with dazzling antiquities and priceless bits of aesthetic bric-a-brac from the High Renaissance and Bolognese periods, became, as Dolejs puts it in his gallery statement, "the focal point for visitors to Florence. By the 1770s," he continues, "it was arguably the most famous room in the world".
As it stands -- both in the Zoffany original and in Dolejs's take on it -- the room is crowded with connoisseurs, diplomats and visitors of every well-bred sort, at the centre of which Zoffany himself clutches a comely Raphael, owned by one of the painter's patrons, George Nassau Cowper, which the two of them are apparently trying to sell to George III of England.
Marginally interesting stuff, I guess (especially to art historians) but, given its front-and-centre presence in a gallery of contemporary art, who really cares?
Well, Dolejs seems to. For him, the Zoffany painting appears to have generated a whole clutch of rich meanings and associations, some of them central to contemporary art discourse.
First, let's get something clear. What we're actually looking at here is a large-scale photograph of Jakub Dolejs's painting of Johan Zoffany's painting. And there's even more perceptual flim-flammery to it than that: For in addition to repainting the Zoffany in his own terms (adding and subtracting figures here and there, adding and subtracting works of art here and there), the artist has painted extra, spurious bits of the Zoffany and propped them up in the foreground of this new, stitched-together Frankenstein's monster of a painting, digitally melded them carefully (but not too carefully) back into his first version of the work and then re-photographed the whole thing.
To what end? Well, I suppose this pastiche-processing speaks, albeit mechanically, to the changing vicissitudes of accepted taste (then and now), and to the ways authenticity has always been fetishized. It also seems to address the way genuine mastery in the fine arts is being largely replaced by various semi-satisfactory, increasingly oblique approaches to any sort of important aesthetic meaning: in a way, Dolejs's re-presenting of the original Zoffany constitutes an incarnation of our culture's distracted acceptance of almost any settled-for or agreed-upon near-experience, as opposed to any effortful demand for the real thing (which sounds, in a sense, like the story of digitalization itself).
Where does Dolejs really stand on all this dizzying duality? Hard to say. His exhibition, dazzling and ersatz in equal measure, is so sumptuously deadpan, it's hard to know if he deplores or embraces the very cultural conditions he manipulates so skillfully.
