Sunken Histories
Liz Wylie

My first look at Tony Scherman's About 1789 series of paintings and works on paper came with his recent exhibition at the Sable-Castelli Gallery in Toronto. Begun in 1996, the series centres mostly on events and personalities of the French Revolution, but sometimes other themes and subjects intervene. There are paintings of the Vietnam survivor Kim Phuc, who now lives in Oshawa, flower paintings (one of them dedicated to Phuc) and paintings of Heinrich Himmler and Blondi, Hitler's dog. (The latter two relate to Scherman seeing dark similarities between the French Revolution and the Third Reich.) The series' exploration will culminate soon with an international travelling exhibition of "forensic portraits" of Napoleon, all depicting him while shaving, looking out toward the viewer as if into a mirror. These will be documented in Chasing Napoleon, a book on Scherman soon to be published by Edition [sic] in Scotland.

Napoleon and the French Revolution may seem unlikely and distant subjects for a Toronto painter, but Scherman, though born in Toronto, was raised in Paris, from age four to nine, before his family moved to London, England. Napoleon, and the myth of Napoleon, were a part of his childhood.

But what do we make of paintings that hark back to the style of Velazquez*, utilize the seductive, ancient appeal of encaustic and seem, at first glance, to deny or ignore much of the gnashing of teeth over the state of painting that has gone on for the last several decades? While Scherman's works seem boldly declarative, he himself speaks self-mockingly of his "speculations into painting." And in fact the viewer, upon engaging with the work, embarks on a beautifully seamless reconsideration of the essential tenets of Western civilization, not just of painting and its traditions.

My immediate reaction when I first saw the paintings was that Scherman's work had entered the realm of truly great art. It was breathtaking. After repeat visits, my mind remains unchanged.

Scherman has found his subject and created an ongoing body of work that is self-referential, but in a virtually invisible manner. It speaks to its audience like a Shakespearean soliloquy delivered by a modem actor. It is brazenly ambitious yet unsullied by the Bovary-ism - that small, bourgeois ambition of Madame Bovary - that I think perhaps Scherman most fears. The work is pure in its aim to provide a late-twentieth-century painterly response to some of the most profound questions of ail time - questions of evil, power, weakness and genocide.

Tony Scherman

La Vendée 1996-98

Encaustic on canvas 152 x 152 cm

Photo John Howarth

Courtesy Sable-Castelli Gallery