GEOFF REES

GEOFF REES exhibition
February 10th – March 10th, 2018

An iconic figure in Vancouver’s painting community, Geoff Rees has been the recipient of major Canadian and International art awards. Having taught for 35 years at Emily Carr and retiring in 1992, he has created an everlasting impact on his students and fellow professors. All the while, he maintained his own studio practice as an important priority and necessity. Although Rees has been constantly producing exceptional new works in his studio, many of them have not been available for viewing since the closing of Buschlen Mowatt. This will be his first major solo exhibition in over 20 years, featuring a body of Rees’s most striking large scale abstract expressionist works. Elan Fine Art feels privileged to represent Geoff Rees and be able to showcase this extremely beautiful and powerful body of paintings.

“Geoff Rees is a quester – one of those rare and gentle temperaments in search of a truth beyond the actualities of everyday living. For him there is no absolute didactic answer to the ancient question, “What am I, whither am I going?” There is only the seeking.

His relation to art manifests this. There is only the process of art, the intimations of mystery in what is evoked by the way forms move together to find their accord, the “sea changes” they go through to accommodate. His paintings seem to be seeking a configuration. His forms seem to have passed through the spirit and emerge cleansed and illumined by an inner light. His paintings are calm, awaiting resolution, inviting the viewer to share with him a reflection on the nature of just being.

In his search his pores are wide open. He responds to music, poetry, literature, and mythology – and above all, to human warmth. Yet, under this gentle surface, he is tough-minded and persistent with the inner strength to hold to a vision without reliance on external acclaim. His paintings are necessarily large because he needs to be lost in them; and abstract because he deals with states of realization; and his definition of form is loose because he does not court finalities. His movement is floating rather than structurally dynamic, because he is not aggressive. His colour is radiant rather than decorative, and cool rather than flamboyant: it remains just this side of the white mixing film, so the light is rather silvery and distant. Only recently has he begun to tighten up the compositional stress toward more imposing configuration. His output in both notebook studies and canvas is prodigious.

To help keep his inner equipoise, and as a relief from the analysis demanded by teaching, he has traveled to cultures where the non-rational approach to comprehending the world is uppermost. I recall that immediately after graduation from the former Vancouver School of Art, he set out on a motor trip across Europe and Asia as far as Afghanistan and in recent years he has spent time in New Guinea, North Africa, Sri Lanka, India and other places. Although his mind and sympathetic personality have made him a good teacher of the art spirit, he is himself a perpetual student. It is a pleasure to see him finally exhibiting.”

Jack Shadbolt

January 23, 1990