Donna Boyko
Warped Corona: recent drawings
June 16 – July 31, 2011
R.M. VAUGHAN: THE EXHIBITIONIST
Saturday June 25, 2011 The Globe and Mail Page R12
Donna Boyko at DAVID KAYE GALLERY
Until July 31, 1092 Queen St. W., Toronto; davidkayeprojects.com
Donna Boyko, in a twitchy new series of pastels on paper at David Kaye Gallery, invites the viewer inside the busy minds of all creatures gastrotrich and sipuncula. Displayed in the L-shaped front corner of the gallery, Boyko’s works come in two sets – works on cream-coloured paper and on midnight-black paper. The differences, however, are more than chromatic.
In the white-paper series, Boyko creates vibrating fields of watery citrus colours and pairs them with hard or soft marks in complementary egg-yolk yellow, zinfandel-rosé pink, delphinium-purple blue and, in bold counterpoint, cigarette-ash black. Figures morph into and out of solidity, play hide-and-seek in Boyko’s overlapping terras-not-so-firma.
Watching these works slither and hitch across the paper, one can imagine being a multieyed insect crossing a garden, always on nervous lookout for beaks. The black-paper creations, however, carry an even more frantic, nervous-breakdown energy. These are night works, works that speak of car crashes, fireworks (and fireflies), sudden, white-hot irruptive bursts from flashlight beams or invading aliens, of sequined dresses hovering over candlelit tables. Abstractly speaking, that is.
Unlike the white-paper works, the black-paper works contain no recognizable figuration – only fractions of figures, pattern samples, blurts and squeals of colour and absolutely smashing, glass-paperweight-in-a-blender pastel pencil marks.
Boyko roughhouses with the lowly pastel pencil the way Coltrane used to manhandle a saxophone. She busts in and out of her own lines, smudges, relines and rechalks out her terrain, and, in the end, presents works that, for all that insectile jigging, have been massaged to a calming halt.
If, however, I came back next week and realized the various bits at play had decided to rearrange themselves, I would not be surprised. Boyko’s compositions are restless; ever-anxious to recombine, copulate, to skip over the flat paper like water beetles in the rain.
