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GARY MICHAEL DAULT

November 10, 2007
Philip Iverson
at the Lonsdale Gallery
$1,000-$20,000. Until Nov. 30, 410 Spadina Rd., Toronto; 416-487-8733
Philip Iverson was a terrific painter - always, I think, vastly underrated and, consequently, undervalued. He died last year, on Aug. 13, of brain cancer, at age 41. Toronto's Lonsdale Gallery has now mounted a small but important survey of Iverson's work (called Celebrate an Extraordinary Life) featuring paintings and drawings from 1999 to 2003. It's a beautiful show. Iverson was astoundingly prolific, cramming more work into the brief trajectory of his days than most artists make in lifetimes twice as long. He made drawings every day - of that day's events: a sort of graphic diary that was funny, insightful, drawn with a comic-book urgency combined with a poet's tenderness and delicacy of observation. But mostly he was a painter - an almost unbelievably physical, bodily one. Iverson's way was to grasp the inner meaning of his subject, almost as if he had to lay hold of it with his bare hands. I remember watching him paint seven years ago, when he lived in Fredericton. My son, then 11 years old, was with me, and we were both astounded to watch Iverson's antics: He would dance and growl before the canvas, finally leaping at it with a loaded brush, like a combination of Bruce Lee and Vaslav Nijinsky. "Energy is everywhere!" Iverson wrote ecstatically in his journal for Jan. 15, 2004, and he somehow managed to get that energy directly into his pictures. "I'm not here to teach, parse," he wrote a month later, "I am here to react." And react he did, all over the place. He was a superb portraitist, for example (see his Alex Katz and Eli Wiesel in the current exhibition), and a maker of convulsively beautiful landscapes - which took whatever they needed from abstraction and came out the other side (see, for example, his exquisite Greek Vacation and Shore Dance). I wish he were still dancing around, snarling and yelping and lunging at his pictures, carving masterworks out of chaos. Though I suppose it's good to be grateful for what there is.

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