Ron Terada

From the early 1990s to the present day, Vancouver artist Ron Terada has worked on intimately scaled and fastidiously rendered paintings that incorporate a variety of found texts. His sources have included the personal ads from daily newspapers, typographically varied first names (principally of his friends), and, in the series in the present exhibition, advertisements for solo exhibitions in prestigious European and American private galleries culled from the endless pages of high-end publicity found in the American art magazine, Artforum.

Terada specifically chooses the Artforums of the late 1980s because of the abundance of high key — and expensive — colour used in the advertisements. There is also an implicit acknowledgment of the halcyon days of international art market buoyancy associated with galleries (such as the galleries from Germany, Austria, and Los Angeles cited in these paintings) that felt moved to advertise in the flagship New York art journal at that time.

The notion of a rarefied set is further emphasized by Terada’s selection of exclusively male “brand name” artists such as Terry Winters, Günther Förg, Robert Gober, Donald Judd, Lucio Fontana, On Kawara, Imi Knoebel…. This “canon” of artists is recast, if not eclipsed, by Terada’s celebration of the advertisements’ graphic design.

Terada builds his paintings upon finely sanded gesso grounds that support further layers of thinly glazed acrylic medium. These coloured surfaces resemble the semi-matte quality of printer’s ink on paper, echoing their magazine sources. The typography is immaculately painted on top of the monochromatic ground using a vinyl-cut stencil process. The resulting invisibility of the artist’s hand presents a kind of veiled virtuosity that playfully acknowledges Terada’s parenthetical distance from the primary experience of either the brush or the bona fide.

From Masquerade: Lucy Hogg, Tulsa Kinney, Ron Terada (exhibition brochure), Mercer Union, Toronto, 1997