Don Jean-Louis

By GARY MICHAEL DAULT
Globe and Mail
Saturday, March 19, 2005

Don Jean-Louis, who lives and works in Qualicum Beach, B.C., is one of this country's most innovative and least understood -- and therefore least appreciated -- artists. For the last 40 years, his work has been consistently both formally and theoretically advanced, often demonstrating its incarnating of the artist's tireless researches into the performance of light -- and the meaning of that performance.
Jean-Louis's remarkable free-hanging sculpture for the atrium of the Canadian embassy in Beijing -- a gigantic stainless- steel mobile, the blades of which subtlyevoked both maple keys and helicopter rotors -- remains one of this country's most successful and least-known works of public sculpture.

For his current exhibition, Light Interruption, Jean-Louis has produced a suite of very large (90 by 137 cm), silvery, photographically derived works on paper which, given the fact that the artist emphatically denies their having ever been digitally interfered with by Photoshop,
are luminously inexplicable and, in their final effect, optically dreamlike. Jean-Louis, who delights in salvaging antiquated technical processes and reharvesting from them fresh new effects, claims, in this
case, to have employed 35-mm Polaroid slide film -- which is no longermade--and to have printed the images on a 42-inch-wide (106 cm) digital printer.

The results are lush and sensuously inexplicable. The pictures are filled with pearlescent chemical clouds, burns, leaks, siftings, molecular shudderings, pixilations of silver dust and molecules of pure, deep night. In two of them -- pictures made, one might well imagine, strictly for writers -- a portable typewriter, nestled at the bottom of the photograph (if indeed photographs is what these are), burns with enough radiance to ignite the rest of the work into a sort of moody, sublime chaos that looks primordial and fecund -- what thought might look like if it turned, literally, to illumination