Ronald Boaks
Still Life: recent photography
May 17 – June 10, 2007
Ronald Boaks, Still Life, Roses for Wreatha, 2007, edition 6/10
Boaks says “In referencing Renaissance still life pictures, I am engaging a dialogue between Beauty and Modernism. Between ‘Less is More’ I am stopping at ‘Enough’.
My Modernist paintings determine the background. A shelf crosses the painting creating a stage for a variety of characters to play off the background and each other. The players are books, tools and objects from my home and studio. The flowers are primarily from my garden as are the bird nests and insects. The technique is much like creating a collage. A friend has observed that I am painting with objects. The composition is complete when balance is achieved. Enough! Take the picture!
This series of museum quality photographs has been created in my studio using a 4 x 5 Linhof camera.”
All the photographs are a Archival Fujiflex mounted to Dibond Aluminum with a Lexan laminate. The editions are numbered out of ten, with two artist proofs that can be in a different size than the rest of the edition.
GALLERY GOING THE GLOBE AND MAIL – Saturday, June 2, 2007 Page R20
GARY MICHAEL DAULT
RONALD BOAKS AND DAVID McCLYMENT AT THE DAVID KAYE GALLERY
The Boaks photos range from $1,900 to $5,300. At 1092 Queen St. W., Toronto; 416-532-9075
I cannot imagine photographs more remote in feeling and spirit from Roger Ballen’s (currently showing at Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto) than those of Toronto-based photographer Ronald Boaks. Boaks makes photo-tableaux as well, but his are succulent, chromatically riotous pileups of still-life objects – books, pieces of fruit, flowers, curios – meticulously photographed with the artist’s hefty Linhof so that they are possessed of the kind of definition that makes you want to reach out and squeeze a peach or sniff a lily blossom. As rich and as overabundant as 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings, and as unabashedly bountiful as a Victorian boudoir (and as decadent as the devil), Boaks’s hallucinatingly rich mega-photos are shamelessly sensational, and apparently sublimely unconcerned about restraint, irony, objectivity, text and subtext (though they do contain all sorts of whispered literary allusions and word-games) and all the other anxious issues that inform artists these days. His photos have titles like Still Life, The Role of Pleasure in Desire and Still Life, A Muse at the Opera. Boaks offers unalloyed delight, and great shameful gobs of it at that.
