Andrew
McPhail at Robert Birch Gallery
The Globe and Mail
Saturday March 27, 1999
by Gary Michael Dault
Andrew
McPhail's mordant MICRO-RETRO is cunningly
named. For this small deft and deadpan
exhibition, McPhail has mined the rich vein of
his own former works, using sundry swatches and
shards from earlier pieces, as the basis for
these bright, elfin drawings in pencil crayon on
mylar. The drawings, each 12 inches by 12
inches, in candy colours, make up one large
mosaic of the artist's sensibility. They are an
inventory of the things McPhail likes enough to
draw: things such as a coffee table in yellow
outline on a searing orange ground, two blue
wine goblets on a pink disc, two confrontational
swans beak to beak, the anguished light bulb
that hangs down in Picasso's GUERNICA, the
signatures (over and over, like a wallpaper
pattern) of Picasso, Monet and Van Gogh. Skulls.
Trees. Mice. Happy Faces. It's a long shopping
list. What saves McPhail from triviality and
campiness is his touching earnestness, his
labour-intensiveness, and his apparent
commitment to a hopelessly out-of-reach heroism
in art - and his willingness to honour, instead,
what is here and what is available.