Alex Colville: Return

by Tom Smart

Alex Colville: Eternal Return builds upon the extensive body of literature and exhibitions about one of Canada’s most renowned, award-winning artists. Beginning with Embarkation (1994), this book, which accompanies a traveling exhibition and a Website, showcases Colville’s paintings and prints of the last ten years and discusses them in relation to select earlier pieces and the several contexts in which they were created. It suggests that his creative process and his new finished work constitute a personal mode of witnessing, an essential visual testimony in response to trauma. Alex Colville was a Canadian war artist, sent to Europe to chronicle the events of the Second World War. He was one of three painters admitted to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as it was being liberated, and Alex Colville: Eternal Return proposes that Colville's life work as an artist has been to return artistically and metaphorically to the extraordinary horrors that he experienced in Germany in 1945. To express this unimaginable chaos, Colville sought order, which he found in an artistic style defined as "magic realism."

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

144 pages, Hardcover

First published September 28, 2003

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

How much you'll like this book depends on how much you like Colville.
I generally find him fine but not too exciting. Certainly not as intriguing as the Neue Sachlichkeit artists, who greatly influenced his work.

I tend to prefer her his animals and seascapes over his geometric city and highway scenes or his human beings, although I do appreciate his use of negative space in landscape.



As for the text, the best portions were those which relied more heavily on Colville's own words, especially his accounts of his wartime experience.



I can't say I was impressed by the author's additions, some of which seem quite odd.

A dog sits in the back seat of a car, its sharp face giving it a kind of human vitality... Colville wants to reflect the sense that "dogs like to be in cars," even though at some level the dog in the womb-like Volkswagen Beetle is not a believable image... The woman turning to look at the dog suggests that the two are communicating and that the dog is a doppelganger, a double of a ghost or a living person, in this instance Colville himself. The dog shows no malice as it passively observes the woman.

What is not believable about this painting? Where does this doppelganger idea come from? Either I'm completely missing something or Mr. Smart has never interacted with a dog. And possible doesn't know how to parallel park.

I'll leave you with another favorite Colville subject: people near water.

[Aras · Rating 4 out of 5]

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