Courtesy of the AGA

Sylvain Voyeur | The AGA retrospective of the Edmonton artist's work is a great chance to give paintings like Lake Louise a close inspection.

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Art Gallery of Alberta

This week, Jill and Mandy peer into the history of one of Alberta’s “top 10 artists of the century” with a visit to the AGA’s retrospective of Sylvain Voyer’s very productive lifetime of work.

Jill: I’ll be honest with you: I was not all that excited about seeing this show. The work of Sylvain Voyer that I had previously seen were his large-scale nature paintings of wheatfields, mountains, sunflowers, and so on. I’m not especially fond of these paintings and was kind of moaning about the prospect of seeing several of them hanging in one huge area. But the show really awakened my appreciation of an artist who has created a striking amount of work and who has done much more experimentation with his artistic means than I ever gave him credit for. What did ya think, Mandy?

Mandy: I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this exhibition, actually, other than a whole lot of canola fields. I had seen a few of Voyer’s “tree” paintings that are in the AGA’s permanent collection, but I had no idea what his earlier and experimental work would be like. This retrospective provides a unique opportunity to see the impressive evolution an artist’s work can undergo over the course of several decades.

Jill: Yes! And oh wow, was I completely thrown back by the sheer awesomeness of his earlier work. I was particularly intrigued by those tiny realist paintings, which are so incredibly detailed that the viewer literally becomes lost in their scenery. The amount of time and care he put into these small paintings —looking, documenting — is impossible to miss. Every single one is the product of scrupulous observation and love.

Mandy: They do have a lot of character. I kind of feel the word “endearing” suits them most. I admire the way Voyer has not felt the need to restrict his style. He’s always painted landscapes, but at the same time, he was definitely aware of — and participated in — geometric abstraction and surrealism. I think you can really see the connection between those early pieces from the ’60s and ’70s and his contemporary large-scale landscapes.

Jill: I can see the connection, yes. However, I think that what the larger current paintings are missing is that level of careful, loving observation. The smaller works boast the kind of small mistakes and incongruences that you only find when you’re looking hard at nature itself; the larger ones, on the other hand, have a sort of all-over, hasty paint-handling quality that makes you think the artist has gone on autopilot.

Mandy: That might be due to the fact that Voyer did most of the work on location, en plein air. When you’re working outdoors on such a large scale, it must be difficult to take every detail of what you’re seeing into consideration. But I don’t know if that’s really what the more recent paintings are about, anyway. They seem to be emphasizing the more formal aspects of painting. Voyer’s using simplified compositions and keyed-up colour rather than the more realist depictions of the earlier work.

Jill: I suppose so. I still enjoy the early works much more. I was also excited to learn that Voyer is also an accomplished printmaker — the “TV Presents” series of 1965 and his small hand-printed artist book Edmonton Had a Beautiful River Valley from 1963-4 demonstrate someone who knows his way around the lithography stone and the copper etching plate.

Mandy: Ha — of course! Those were pretty great — I appreciate the weirdness of those TV heads. Its also worth noting that Voyer has some pretty important connections to the Edmonton community. He was a co-founder of the artist-run centre Latitude 53, which still plays an important role in the exposure of alternative and emerging art and artists. I know that we’ve both been greatly affected by its presence here.

Jill: Sylvain Voyer is pretty much the definition of “more than meets the eye.” He’s had a long and varied career in the visual arts, attempting anything and everything at least once. Now’s your chance to check out one of Alberta’s true greats!

Sylvain Voyer is on display at the Art Gallery of Alberta until Mar. 22.