JANIS PROVISOR: LIVING ON HART

CANADA is pleased to announce Living On Hart a one-person exhibition of paintings and drawings by Janis Provisor.

November 22, 2024 - January 11, 2025

The works range in size from large to medium in format and are executed with watery or thick watercolor and water soluble oil paint on canvas or paper. The paint handling is forthright, and the semi-abstract imagery hints at a sense of both pathos and humor. While colorful, Provisor has a palette all her own, full of saturated yet muted color that she often places on top of dark grounds which give the paintings a nocturnal feel. She will often let the paint trickle and puddle on the surfaces creating shapes that have the look of crenulated coral or give the impression of gazing at a Tang Dynasty scholar rock; full of suggestions but no answers.

The paintings feel casual but never flip. Provisor often starts a painting by scrawling handwritten stream of consciousness notes across the surface of the painting with colored pencil. These notes gradually get covered as she works, becoming reminiscent of the gauzy scrawls Cy Twombly used to allude to writing while acting as cyphers that kept meanings tantalizingly elusive. Provisor's process sets the emotional tone. The works are autobiographical in nature, giving Provisor a psychic push as she maintains a precarious balance in the paintings.

In paintings Mask, 2020 and Livid, 2024, the surfaces are animated by what Micheal Fried, in his book Manet’s Modernism, referred to as “faciness”. Fried coined the term to describe the phenomenon where the format of a painting begins to resemble a human face, with the power to transmit personality and feeling.

Provisor's use of oversized eyes, noses or mustaches, even when well camouflaged, gives the uncanny sense of the paintings gazing back at the viewer. Engaging with Provisor's work isn’t a passive activity, but rather full of give and take as the paintings' content and material unravel with participation.