Maltese dreamscapes

RM Vaughan is a Toronto based writer and filmmaker whose latest book, Invisible to Predators, is available from ECW Press. He is also the author of magazine articles and a National Post column that he archives in his blog. In this entry, he writes about the latest exhibition by John Borg at the O'Connor Gallery in Toronto. From Rmvaughanink:

..John Borg’s new collection of gouache on paper works at the O’Connor Gallery is a lovely reminder of why art that relies on and celebrates the impulsive gesture will always prompt an immediate emotional response. Few of us, let’s admit it, are careful planners or emotionally cautious, and art that reflects our own impulsiveness (and the subsequent vulnerabilities that that impulsiveness prompts) speaks to us with a febrile directness. If Borg were a singer, he’s be wobbly but real Morrisey, not note perfect but plastic Mariah..

Visitors to the O’Connor Gallery expect a heaping helping of nekkid menfolk..but after they ogle Borg’s supine and slippery slabs of flesh, they might be surprised to find themselves just as drawn to the painter’s luminous and ghostly paintings of Maltese interiors.

Compared to his model studies, the Malta paintings are much more cloudy, as if seen through a snow globe, and are washed with a muddied, indirect light. The dusty, sunburnt church corridors and narrow, haunted streets reveal themselves only in faint bursts of light, in patches of clarity surrounded (sometimes smothered) by a murky indistinctness so thick and watery it made me wonder if the paint had dried. These are dreamscapes, not travelogues...

Recent paintings by John Borg