Super! Natural!, 2009, oil and acrylic on wood panel, 96 x 144 inches

No rainbows cresting over misty waterfalls.  No soaring peaks at sunset.  Canadian artist Kim Dorland gives us a decisively unsentimental view of nature in his new paintings at Freight + Volume Gallery on West 24th Street in New York’s Chelsea art district.  Cheekily titled “Super! Natural!” after an old Canadian advertising campaign, the show presents landscapes rendered in an almost radioactive palette. Indeed, the riot of colors not only makes the eyes swim, the sheer weight of oil paint applied to the canvases produces a heady, slightly woozy experience.

The scenes which Dorland constructs from these heaps of pigment are not only depictions of landscapes, their very structures feel a bit like topographical maps.  While Dorland’s predilection for the gooey stuff of paint has its precursors—notably the School of London painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff—he wears this lineage lightly.  Unlike the steady seriousness with which Auerbach and Kossoff stir their paint, Dorland works with a breezy sense of play.  Alongside copses of conifers executed in several inches of oil, Dorland traces papery thin birch trees with acrylics and spray paint; or squeezes a few glowing globs of paint straight from the tube to suggest a clump of lupins or lilacs.

Sasquatch, 2009, oil and arcylic on wood panel, 96 x 72 inches

In the eight-foot-tall Sasquatch (2009), Dorland conjures a colossal Big Foot, drooling with pink, brown, and orange paint like he’s just snacked on a stack of canvases by Clyfford Still. Dorland has pasted patches of fur on the creature for good measure, and given him a dead hare to grip in his right paw.  Maybe this is dinner, or maybe our misunderstood Sasquatch is just trying to explain a picture to his furry companion, à la Joseph Beuys.

RIP Tom Thomson, 2009, oil and arcylic on wood panel, 96 x 72 inches

In the towering canvas RIP Tom Thomson (2009), as well as his smaller wooded scenes, Dornan scars the tree trunks with phrases ranging from the enigmatic—“The Boy is Lost”—to the decidedly more uncouth.  To some, this scribbling will simply connote a sense of desecration, the violation—yet again—of natural beauty.  Yet Dorland does not seem to be after such a simple environmental polemic.  There is too much beauty here, and that includes the graffiti.

This is nature as it is experienced by people who are surrounded by it, who can admit to once or twice tossing a beer can into a ravine, or proudly carving their name into a pine tree.  There is certainly a place for the mystical nostalgia of an artist like Peter Doig—another painter who plumbs the memories of his rural Canadian childhood—but Dorland gives us the pleasures of a more tangible natural world, in all its spectacular indelicacy.

Kim Dorland, “Super! Natural!,” May 21-June 25, 2009, at Freight + Volume, 542 west 24th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011.

Written by,
Dr. Aaron Rosen

Aaron Rosen is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.  His first book, Imagining Jewish Art:  Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj, was recently published by Legenda Press in Oxford.