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Harold Klunder The Lethbridge Paintings
August 26 - October 4, 2000
Organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery
with funding assistance from The Canada Council for the Arts.
James Campbell, Montreal.
Excerpted from the essay
Harold Klunder has long been established as one of this country’s most significant artists. In 25 years of exemplary painting exhibitions, Klunder has demonstrated the tenacity and unique expressive tenor of his artistic vision. An artist infatuated with the voluptuous physicality of pure pigment – and one devoted to exploring the full register of its possibilities – Klunder has sought to imbue painting with a volatile, tactile and phenomenally restless spirit. His paintings are impossible to pin down, and cannot be wrestled into stasis. Trying to pigeonhole them is a wholly futile task. They will not stand still. Their expressive symbols and images arrest our attention, and reward our own most private search for meaning. Klunder longs for painting’s absent holism, as we all do who value that lost grail, and this search for the whole has led him progressively further inwards, because he has come to understand, like the alchemists, that the truth of it cannot be found on the outside of the human being, but only inside.
Klunder has developed his own mythic-symbolic language, and it is one that has contributed greatly to the syntax of abstract painting – of all painting, for that matter – that is being done now. If it is one born of deliberate excess, in the isolated studio, where the play of paint knows no limits save those of the painting plane itself; it is also a symbolic language anchored in, and sustained by, corporeal performance. Similarly, the symbols that emerge from the fractured crust of paint are experienced by us with an almost visceral sense of recognition – and are welcomed as readily by the body as by the eye and mind. Perhaps this is because Klunder’s paintings are rife with atavisms which catch us up in an ongoing mythologization of self and world. Carnivorous and incarnate, seemingly inchoate but possessed of deep symbolic order, with a fragmented folklore and a remarkable cohesion of form, these paintings pull us inwards...and do not release us easily from the gravity of their orbits.
Klunder reminds us that painting is always on the inside (a secret Cezanne knew – and even its ironic surrogate today flirts with interiority when it seems to snub it). Alchemy’s enduring lesson is one Klunder knows well – everything transpires within the body. Which is why, for this artist, painting could never be illustrative, even when recognizable forms emerge from it, for it is an inherently hermeneutic and transmutative art. His is a salutary attempt to salvage from the infinite the materia prima in terms of symbols and forms which continually reward our search for specifically human, embodied meanings and, not least, the beauty of the unknown and, perhaps, the unknowable.
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