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Moving Images, Luke Painter
Patel Brown Gallery, Montreal
August 2024
Behind each work is an intuitive process of image selection. Allowing himself to be guided by their emotive qualities, Painter tends to sit on his references, for months, sometimes even years, before finding a way to integrate them into his work. The four pieces in the Scenography series, for example, are grounded in a long-standing, overarching interest in set design that has surfaced in his practice before. Taking their cue from theatre sets designed by eccentric architects, these works are the result of minimal intervention on Painter’s part  –mostly consisting of a creative colouration– which has the effect of amplifying the style of their original creators. In both their form and content, they address architecture’s reputation for refusing to play a secondary role, engaging with the classic conflict between creative ego and practical application. Each piece conveys a tension between presence and absence and addresses theatrical tropes of anticipation and dramatic effect. The stages in Scenography invite us to walk up their stairs, rest under their archways, and disappear through their portals.
Hermes Sample Sale and Magic Show expands on the concept of set design as sculpture with a sense of humour that is prevalent in some of Painter’s more absurd and well-known image constructions. The iconic buckles, chains, and patterns of a well-known luxury brand become the central elements of a ludicrous, but undeniably gorgeous, scene where scale, gravity, and depth have lost their logic in favour of the absurd. In true form, Painter both challenges and exploits our attraction to beauty, playing on our desires and indulgences through a truly opulent representation of colour, texture, and form. This magic show reveals all its tricks, and yet, we are still in awe of its showmanship.
Set up as frames for activation through the presence of a viewer, the works in Moving Images collectively succeed in foregrounding the background and enticing us towards an exercise in breaking the fourth wall. Instead of hiding his sources, Painter places them in plain view, altering only their context and material. In this way, the exhibition culminates in the video work Modern Wande and Decken Dekoration which functions not only as a chance to display its author’s database of found pattern, but as a tool for anchoring Painter’s practice in a larger project that interrogates the borders between sampling, borrowing, appropriating, and fetishizing the found image.
Image by Jean-Michael Seminaro.
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