Contemporary Registers

Contemporary Registers features a selection of works produced between 1989 and the present. This period corresponds to the deployment of key elements in Wainio's mode of visual thinking, namely the vignette and the motifs of the spinning disc and of the book. One of Canada's most esteemed painters, her work is noted for the coherence of its development and the subtle nature of her compositions. Ironically, this coherence is made possible by the artist's ability to register the incoherent nature of human experience. 

The emergence of Carol Wainio's work coincided with the upsurge in neo-figurative and neo-expressionist painting during the early 1980s, but her work was always positioned on the boundaries of these movements. The artist opted for a figurative approach that was articulated between a past and present that eschewed effects of pastiche, irony and expressionist fervour. Twenty years later, her work distinguishes itself by its sustained investigation of contemporaneity. 

The eye constantly shifts its focus as it explores a group of Carol Wainio's paintings: none of her images comes with the assurance of certainty. They call upon vision to feel things that can only be glimpsed. Tension comes from contemplating contemporaneity from various simultaneous heterogeneous registers. For Wainio, one must succeed in "holding one thing in mind while trying to see another." Her work is characterized by a field of oscillation between the inaccessible atmosphere of the past and the barely crystallized present. The history she sketches traces out a precarious path or narrative between the practices of everyday life, ancient customs, the imaginary powers of fable and historical chronicle. 

Michele Theriault 
Curator