Calgary-based artist Chris Millar’s garish and disturbing paintings have recently created quite a buzz in the Canadian art scene and abroad. In the past year, articles on the young artist and images of his comic book and punk-inspired creations have been featured in Canadian Art magazine as well as in numerous newspapers and have graced the cover of the latest Preview Gallery Guide. Many have become familiar with Millar’s work through photos published in the media, but these fail to do justice to the real thing.
Fortunately, Calgarians will have the opportunity to see Millar’s work in all its gritty glory until January 26, as the sole visual arts component of the One Yellow Rabbit High Performance Rodeo. With a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the highly regarded ThreeWalls Gallery in Chicago this past September (his first show in the United States) and a second-place, $15,000 award granted in September on behalf of the peer-juried Royal Bank of Canada Canadian Painting Competition under his belt, Millar’s putting the final touches on a solo exhibition at TrépanierBaer.
Starting its new year of exhibitions with a bang, the gallery is exhibiting its first solo showing of Millar’s work. To unite nine of Millar’s works is already an achievement, as the full-time artist produces only about four works a year and most sell the minute the paint dries. This exhibition is very important for Millar, as it will give him the opportunity to share and celebrate three years of laborious work with a large audience before the paintings are sold or returned to their proud owners.
The mind-boggling complexity of Millar’s works — constructed by overlapping layers upon intricate layers of text, imagery, colours and forms — misleads the viewer into thinking that the artist creates cut-out collages from disparate sources without following any logic. However, each work represents an elaborate fictional story or spoof that can be read from left to right, top to bottom.
Many of the main characters that populate these stories are well-known individuals from the Calgary art scene or individuals that have influenced Millar on a personal level. For instance, Heads I Made: Phase I, II and III (2005 to 2006), is a trilogy of paintings that spoof artist Evan Penny’s life and work. In these paintings, Millar appropriated Penny’s signature stretched portraits and also added his own twisted version of what the work could look like if Penny chose less appealing subjects.
Eddie Got Borshed (2006-07), another painting parody, is the absurd fictional story of how renowned Calgary-based artist Chris Cran, portrayed here as the TV character Frasier, turns into a werewolf by using infected masking tape to create his paintings. The Magic Mortar (2007) is the epilogue to the “Chrasier” painting, where the Japanese legend of the magic mortar collides with the story of how our furry hero opens a sushi bistro in Japan. Each borderless “scene” from these stories, painted directly on the surface with surgical precision, bleeds into one another to generate a less linear narrative.
The physical borders of the canvas can’t even contain Millar’s imagination. His scenes often protrude and continue on the sides and off the edges of the canvas, giving the paintings significant sculptural qualities. The larger, semi-detached objects or scenes that dangle, hang or sit atop his canvasses are literally footnotes to his story, asterisks and all. By observing the transformations of Millar’s body of work over the past three years, the footnotes, such as the ones in Boiyd Howses (2007), have obviously become more prominent in recent works, sometimes visually engulfing the central canvas with their relative size and irregular shape. Inspired by the physical qualities of these footnotes, Millar created two small, sculptural works that will be exhibited for the first time at TrépanierBaer.
Millar hasn’t captured the attention of the Canadian art scene because of the controversial and unsettling nature of some of the imagery in his works. Rather, his popularity is more likely due to his unbelievable craftsmanship combined with his inventiveness and uncensored storylines and spoofs that make his creations more than just “pretty” pictures. After immortalizing Chris Cran, Evan Penny, John Will, Yves Trépanier and Kevin Baer in his twisted versions of reality, who will Millar paint next?
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