A different take on the ineffable qualities of that which surrounds us in on display in spades with Daisuke Takeya’s sky portraits at Christopher Cutts. Here was another instance of the images on the website intriguing me with their irreproducible quality. I saw what the artist was doing and knew it would only be clear once I approached the work in person. Being a lover of radical blankness or the aestheticization of empty space, I was eager to see these clear skies in the flesh. Once I got there, however, I was a bit disappointed when the voids I was hoping for ended up far more illustrative than sublime. Takeya includes a thin line of landscape at the bottom of each canvas and this miniature realism lends a storybook quality to the paintings. I felt like my six year old daughter would get a kick out of them. This effect is furthered when the artist inserts a tiny bird or airplane (or, even worse, a shooting star and most banally, a rainbow) in the atmosphere. It’s only in a couple works where the sky goes transcendent and shifts from a mere representation into a complex layering of colours that capture the strange fascination we have with the heavens above.
Terence Dick is Akimblog’s Toronto correspondent and editor. He also writes about art for other publications such as BorderCrossings. Even though some would argue the decade doesn’t end until next year, he is taking this opportunity to list the five most… important? interesting? wonderful? things about the Canadian art scene for the ten year period now known as the 00s (like in “n00b”). They aren’t in any particular order and represent a good week and a half of idle mulling. Terence fully expects this list to be largely inaccurate and potentially embarrassing about halfway through the next decade. Happy New One!