Exhibition -

GALLERY GOING: VISUAL ARTS: REVIEW
GARY MICHAEL DAULT
July 7, 2007

OSCAR DE LAS FLORES
AT KATHARINE MULHERIN CONTEMPORARY ART PROJECTS
$3,000-$17,000. Until July 21,
1086 Queen St. W., Toronto; 416-537-8827

For his second solo exhibition with Katharine Mulherin, A Provisional History of the Western World, Oscar de Las Flores, who was born in El Salvador and who now divides his time between Toronto and Mexico City, has contrived a suite of 12 small pen-and-ink drawings on sheets of Japanese paper. They are like nothing you've ever seen before.
Unless, of course, you'd care to think back to certain extravagant drawings, etchings and paintings by such artists as Goya, Rembrandt, Rubens, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Archimbaldo, Altdorfer and Durer. There is also a dash of the great Mexican muralists in his work as well - Orozco, say, and Rivera. De las Flores's drawings are unbelievably, exhaustingly, exuberantly congested and teeming with detailed incident - and with prickly, relentless suggestions and implications, all of which seem bent upon illustrating, like the work of his illustrious predecessors, the horror of a world increasingly shorn of its civilized, rational, nurturing values and meanings.
It takes hours (I mean it) to see one of de las Flores's drawings properly. Most of them, to tell the truth, and to give fair warming, are so dense in their detailing you have to commit yourself to them utterly, and enter into the artist's raucous, appalling, savagely satirical little worlds armed with both compassion, humour, patience and, in the end, something like reverence - reverence for the fallen condition of the culture we have made and must be held responsible for. De las Flores's drawings have titles like Carnivorous Homage to Fragonard, The Singular Theory of the Birth of the Crustaceans, The Artist's Auto Da Fe in the Local Purgatory and Chronicles from the Entrails of Military History. Each one is a heavy journey.
Look at one up close - which is the only way - and you'll be gone for a long time. You'll see monsters and superstars (same thing), cartoon characters, saints and devils (with claws and horrid teeth, wearing halos and powdered wigs); you'll see bloat, decay, waste, excess and rot, beatitude, laughter and pain, blessing and damnation. You'll find yourself up to your eyebrows in the extremes of the human condition - and you'll discover, in the end, it's a cleansing, cathartic place to be.