BORDER CROSSINGS // ISSUE #166

January 2025
#166

It’s January 2025 and nothing is certain, nothing fixed or real. Images flicker and pass before they can be comprehended; beauty no longer speaks its name; the virtual is the unreal real, a “there” that can’t ever be reached. But Painting resists. Pigment on canvas or panel or sheet, mark by mark, the brush at the end of the hand linked to the animating pumping heart. Painting.

We bring it to you again in a large, full issue. Heart and spirit; soul and resistance, joy and pleasure, some rage and some hope. The issue opens in a glory of painting. Francis Picabia — source and inspiration for so many artists but still an enigmatic figure, plays and dances here with Brooklyn-based Canadian artist Marcel Dzama. “Francis Picabia: Femmes” was a substantial exhibition at Michael Werner in New York and Border Crossings asked Marcel Dzama to tell us what he saw as he continued his ongoing relationship with the artist. The exchanges between them are lively, Picabia and Dzama moving together through the galleries.

Canadian painter Sky Glabush’s exhibition at Stephen Friedman in New York was a grace and a transcendent gift of large canvasses by an artist who always lifts to the light. And Winnipeg-based Métis artist Ian August tells us how to make a painting his way and includes in his very particular specific subjects, strong and tender tributes to his own roots and history.

The lengthy interview with British painter Celia Paul — a sainted painter whose work is replete with keen intelligence and wisdom does paint and speak like a resolute angel or spirit, of some sort. Her painted biography is an enchantment.

It was interesting to note that this issue of Border Crossings — once done and much laboured on, seemed to carry a life of its own — that spirit and soul runs through the issue in an intense, rich folio for the opening month of this looming year.

Young Canadian painter Élise Lafontaine sees and paints the body as architecture, calling on Samuel Beckett’s sense of including outside and inside at once, with the artist in the middle, to give us a fully-dimensional but still evanescent hovering spirit in her work.

In a visually rich and descriptive essay on the renewed interest in figurative painting, New York critic and curator, Joseph R Wolin offers three painters: Louis Fratino, Salman Toor and Anthony Cudahy who have made their work distinctive in their shared traits. He identifies this “open yet largely un-polemical queerness, deep engagement with art history and a sidestepping of realist styles based on observation or photography in favour of more pictorial models.”

Saskatchewan born, Michif/British artist Rain Cabana-Boucher tells us, in her interview in this issue, that for her rage is a layered emotion and a tool — provoked by the theft and damage, violence and repression visited on Indigenous people from the first days of settlement. Using her work as voice, she noted that the language had been stolen, “So I use Michif in my work and I feel that is a rage in its own way.” In relearning it she makes it present, she says — a tool, in how she uses it, like the brush or charcoal.

For Chantal Khoury, who was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick but whose family’s country of origin is Lebanon, painting is both gesture and a means to recover and fix her cultural history, now less available through time and dislocation. Her marks are there but elusive, clearly image-making but showing a reluctance — like memory, like history, like stories told and retold, culture just beyond reach.

Language and looking, then telling and looking again from close to the source, and never shying from the first-person pronoun have been identifying characteristics of Border Crossings from the earliest days. Lisa Robertson is a Canadian writer living in France. A perfect Border Crosser. In her essay, “Loveknots: speaking with the immediate,” she invites us to enter the place where she works and lives, to look with her at the things her eyes fall on daily and have been assembled so that each is as personal as her own fingerprints. She talks about their dear and valued sources and offers an invitation and the warmth and welcome of her fine language.

This is just some of our Painting issue. There is always so much more, including our extensive — broad and deep — far-ranging review section called, rightly, “Crossovers.”