Article content Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. It’s a monumental anniversary year for Peter Robertson Gallery , which reliably hosts some of the city’s most intriguing commercial art on its walls and plinths.
This Thursday’s opening features some of my favourite imagineers: Sean Caulfield, Gordon Harper, David Janzen and Andrew Rucklidge. All of them are impressionists of a sort, with varying degrees of representational depiction in their works — though everything’s recognizable. Caulfield, with very specific meanings in that clever head, is the one who strays furthest into the abstract and ambiguous, always avoiding dogma.
Harper’s stuff — gorgeous and accessible — has a sort of radioactive, almost punk tension. He’s the most illustrative here in the best of ways. Janzen, meanwhile, successfully plays with this deeply emotional sense of things manmade yet abandoned, like landscapes littered with the detritus from a long-ago robot war.
Toronto’s Rucklidge has that same magic realism vibe going, except his landscapes are meatier and alien, capturing vistas that feel like they could only last a few seconds in some impossible coincidence of light. All of these folks create wicked canvasses, so please pop by the Summer Group Exhibition opening, 7 – 9 p.m.
Thursday at 12323 194 Ave. Plus, something well worth throwing i.