Ernesto Cánovas at Halcyon Gallery

Halcyon Gallery doesn’t look like your regular West End galleries. It is huge and palatial, with high ceilings and polished marble, like the house of a classier Tony Montana. As I entered I wondered just when exactly would they sniff out I didn’t belong there and kindly invite me to remove myself from the premises. They never did, of course, instead they were quite welcoming and they even took my jacket and fed me.

Halcyon Gallery doesn’t look like your regular West End galleries. It is huge and palatial, with high ceilings and polished marble, like the house of a classier Tony Montana. As I entered I wondered when exactly they would sniff out thatvI didn’t belong there and kindly invite me to remove myself from the premises. They never did, of course, instead they were very welcoming and they even took my jacket and fed me.

Which was rather nice because I was there to attend the opening of ‘An American Trilogy, Ernesto Cánovas’ (Barcelona, b. 1971) inaugural solo show for Halcyon.

 “They are hazy almost to the point of abstraction, like an out of focus film frame that has been lost in a shoe box under grandpa’s bed for the last fifty years.”

An American Trilogy features twenty five paintings. Cánovas made these from found images of Americana, digitally manipulated and printed on wooden boards. He then applied layer upon layer of resin and acrylic, and topped it off with meticulously painted shapes and/or geometrical lines in very precisely selected spots (a video projection, part of the exhibition, offers a glimpse into his methods). The finished paintings have an oneiric quality to them. They are hazy almost to the point of abstraction, like an out of focus film frame that has been lost in a shoe box under grandpa’s bed for the last fifty years. The wooden boards on which they are printed/painted, though, with their sinewy arboreal wrinkles, bring to the paintings not only sensations of echoes and ripples, but also the bittersweet warmth of a nostalgia for something you can’t really put your finger on.

In the work Nevada Lights (125 x 190 cm) all you can see is a black and white outstretched hand, holding a microphone. There are some bright spotlights at the back. The picture is grainy and decontextualized, but you know what it is. It’s all the American films you have seen, and all the American music you have heard. It’s part of your past and present (can’t say future because you never know). It’s an icon.

 “For some, Cánovas work, more than bittersweet nostalgia, may seem like a hazy echo of the American Dream – whatever that is – like hungover flashbacks of a drunken night.”

All the paintings in this series are of images and events which have become not only icons of American history and culture, but symbols of their influence on the world. You’ve got John Wayne and JFK, you’ve got the moon landing (Step By Step, 125 x 90 cm), and 9/11. You’ve got muscle cars, sprawling desert landscapes, glamorous women, Native Americans with feather hats and men wearing sharp suits in swanky offices. They are engraved in our subconscious, the meaning having become almost separate from the object, carrying a different significance according to each person’s memories and experiences. In An American Trilogy you don’t so much see the images, as remember them. They’ve always been there, echoing and rippling with occasional flashes of explosive colour, somewhere in the back of your mind.

There’s a duplicity to these memories, though, as the show shifts between Hollywood romanticism to Cold War anxiety. The rugged men in ten gallon hats that shaped the country as they tamed the Wild West and massacred the Native Americans. Or the men that came back home from WWII to get married, have lots of babies, get a job in an office, a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. All this in a relentless pursuit of normality and stability, like some kind of Revolutionary Road nightmare. A handsome, popular and charismatic President… shot in the head. For some, Cánovas’ work, more than bittersweet nostalgia, may seem like a hazy echo of the American Dream – whatever that is – like hungover flashbacks of a drunken night.

 “I felt like we were some kind of future alien society at a gallery opening in the year 3023, admiring these twenty five hypnagogic artefacts from a civilization long lost to the passage of time.”

Throughout the show you can see how Ernesto Cánovas perfected and honed his craft, as the works grow in scale and ambition. This culminates in the centrepiece of the exhibition: A large painting, like a small cinema screen, showing the end title card of an old western. It’s the only work on show in which Cánovas mixes digital manipulation, painting and typography. As soon as you go down the gallery stairs, into the large room where the exhibition is taking place, you can’t help but be drawn to it immediately; the familiar silhouette of a cowboy overlooking an Old West scenario. As you get closer, you notice the dabs of bright paint. And you then you see that the picture has sections which have been cut and pasted in slight misalignment, like some kind of malfunction in your recollections. And in the middle, in big red letters, the words THE END. The painting is called The Beginning. Cánovas is pretty good with titles too.

It’s especially striking looking at these paintings in an environment such as the majestic Halcyon Gallery on an opening night. Catering staff relentlessly walked back and forth with all manner of tantalising food and drink, people in flowing scarves mingled and fellow artists, no doubt, furiously networked. I felt like we were some kind of future alien society at a gallery opening in the year 3023, admiring these twenty five hypnagogic artefacts from a civilization long lost to the passage of time. These hazy memories, beautifully printed in wood, being all that is left of a people who thought they had everything.

Ernesto Cánovas’ An American Trilogy opened on the 30th of April and it’ll be on show in Halcyon Gallery until the 26th of May.