Bobbie Oliver & Patrick Thibert 2018 :Olga Korper Gallery

July 7, 2018 – July 28, 2018

Bobbie Oliver and Patrick Thibert have been part of the gallery stable for more than 30 years, and yet the dialogue that runs through both of their work has never really been considered. Both artists were born in Windsor, Ontario, and similarly both were driven to live elsewhere by a love of travel which has informed their work.

Bobbie and Pat each pursued the abstract throughout their career, focusing on the emotional power of colour and its influence on the eye as it moves and bounces over the surface of their work. In Bobbie’s case, she approaches the plane of her paintings slowly and methodically, investigating how paint sits on the canvas, working acrylics to look like water colour, attempting something as meditative in its final form as it is throughout its making. Her paintings allude to Japanese Calligraphy or Chinese landscape – opaque against sheer, sharp against soft, they move and shift in light and seem to pulse softly on the wall.

If Bobbie is the abstracted feminine, Pat is the abstracted masculine. He pursues the directed line, using the clean saturated colour of powder-coated enamel to direct the eye where he wants it to go, rather than allowing the viewer’s gaze to meander. Pat and Bobbie have both traveled extensively throughout their lives, and their many adventures have naturally influenced the progression of their pieces over time. Pat’s wall sculptures encapsulate the entire journey, the voyage from start to finish. The line, like the life of one man, has both a beginning and an end. Bobbie’s paintings concentrate on the detailed experience of travel, the textures and colours of a new and unknowable place. They are a fragment in time, immersing you in a moment, rather than spanning the entire passage and marking its trajectory like the dotted line that moves across a map in films.

In essence, this exhibition can be treated like a pin dropped in an atlas. How we got here can feel like the work of a lifetime, or the passing of a moment. Like an overused ellipsis marking the beats between breath. It can be silently following the yellow line of a road to a destination out of sight, or the intense, vibrant ululating of an active marketplace in a distant country. It’s the moment of recognition as you blindly search a vast map and, with relief, you spot the flag: You Are Here.