Things of Desire
Volume 1, Number 11
October 30 to November 5, 2008

In the Time of Earthquakes
by Mike Landry

Riding his bike along the Leslie Street spit in Toronto on misty mornings over Lake Ontario, landscape artist Martin Pearce marveled at the beauty. But he also knew that things weren’t as beautiful as they seemed, and if there was no way he was going to jump off his bike and step in the fragrant waters for a dip.

From Lake Ontario and the Southern Ontario landscape around him to Renaissance Sienna, was inspiration for Pearce’s latest exhibition In the Time of Earthquakes. Featuring small villages surrounded by a mountainous landscape, Pearce inserts bright pervading colours to make the images unstable, and landscapes both beautiful and somehow wrong.

“There are bright reds and oranges and greens that are the remnants of scrapped enamel paint. It’s not right, the landscape. It doesn’t fit within the paradigm of a pastoral landscape. It’s an intrusion, a pollution, a contamination. So there’s this something unseen in landscape, or another aspect, which isn’t as it should be.”

Always interested in renaissance paintings from Sienna, he owes much of his earthquake series, including the title, to Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s 1468 work The Virgin Protects Sienna in the Time of Earthquakes. With Mary hovering overhead, the walled village is depicted surrounded by hills and tents used for refuge when a tremor rippled through the town.

“It’s a city where things were not quite as they should be. The ground kept shaking. Things were quite as stable as the inhabitants wanted them to be. So I guess that’s how I feel and that’s why I made the paintings in the way that I did.”

Although Pearce has felt a tremor before, he never intended the work to be a comment about geological activity. From the beginning it was about colour. A similar example to his work that Pearce points to is Ed Burtynsky’s photograph “Nickel Tailings No. 36,” where a red river cuts through the landscape.

Interested in things that are powerful, imposing and beautiful, Earthquakes fits nicely into Pearce’s catalogue. His latest drawing series, Pickering Nuclear Generating Station takes the much maligned, yet necessary, power plant as its subject. The plant, like the fragile villages in Earthquakes, have a certain ambiguity and resonance that enthralls Pearce.

“I don’t feel that they’re didactic but they respond to what I see when I drive along the 401 past Pickering or what I see when I ride by lake Ontario. Instances in the real world spark a particular kind of imaginative response in the way that I work. I don’t sit down to make a comment. I respond because I find life like that, and it would be absurd to make paintings that didn’t include it.”

Accompanying the landscape works in the series are three encaustic paintings. Made with a very vigorous gestures, a large brush and heavy paint, they act as simpler version of larger landscapes. While the paintings deal with the contamination of surface, these works examine weather. Deliberately limited in their range of colours, they’re meant to express a meteorological trouble.

Perhaps the most unsettling work in the series is “Black Villages.” Named and based on the villages surrounding Chernobyl, Pearce found the landscape there beautiful. But with what is like a snapshot of truth, his rendering shows the tiny villages disappearing into darkness with menacing bit of glowing turquoise blue just outside their homes. “It has a very charming in summer but same time not a nice place to live.”

In the Time of Earthquakes will be on display from Tue November 4 - Sun November 30 at Hamilton’s Transit Gallery.