Michael Caines

MICHAEL CAINES

Reviews of Caines' work in the press - in no particular order

"...skilfully and tenderly realized... Wonderful"

"GOING APE" by Si Si Penaloza - Now Magazine, Toronto (2002-01-31)

Naked boys and naked apes make good playmates. That's the message in Toronto artist Michael Caines's new set of handsome drawings. In this curious coupling of man and beast -- a kind of Gorillas In The Mist-meets-Porky's -- Caines makes our fellow primates man's best friend. Adolescent boys lie in repose as their primate friends service them in banal ways -- tying their sneakers or ordering a pizza. Caines represents the chummy chimps et al. as social, domesticated mammals, blasé in their performance of invisible family rituals.

In one especially well-executed drawing, a young man reclines with a placid and hairy orangutan. They look really happy, as if neither will ever sadly be forced to grow up and tend to facial hair or pay for drinks.

Caines's drawings are as skilfully and tenderly realized as his paintings. A departure from the drama of last year's large-scale gorilla paintings (which verged on sentimentality), these fresh drawings accentuate his mischievous sensibilities. Wonderful.

“Ludicrous hallucination”

“Michael Caines” by David Blazer – EYE Magazine Toronto (2003-04-24)

Last year at Zsa Zsa, mischief-maker Michael Caines' apes frolicked with naked teenaged boys; currently at KMArt, they're mourning the boys' mysterious disappearances. In these outrageous new paintings, possibly the end of a primate trilogy begun in 2001, Caines shifts from innocence to experience: hermetic scenes of play from previous works are replaced by landscapes of human remains, medical equipment and, most strikingly, legions of demonic bunnies. In "History is no joke," also the exhibit's title, the bunnies fester; grouped around a wheelchair, they plot to pounce on their orangutan aide and exhume his beloved. It's a ludicrous hallucination, brimming with the most sinister and prurient aspects of children's mythology.

"...rich and resonant as dark chocolate on a warm tongue"

"Relative Species" by R.M. Vaughan - EYE Magazine 2001

I've been (rightfully) accused of never leaving the west end of Toronto. Why would I, with all this top-notch art floating around? The following is a partial (but hardly impartial) guide to the sweetest of the west-end gallery district's many summer fruits. Next column, I'll cross the Styx, answer the three riddles of Charon, pack a lunch and go over to the east end. Godspeed!

Michael Caines and Anna Lefsrud's shared show, Relative Species (to July 30, Bus Gallery, 1080 Queen W.), is a poignant meditation on the human/animal dichotomy that questions our limited, jealously guarded notions of sentience. Lefsrud's multimedia sculptures look like third-grade science projects made by kids far too smart for third grade. Creating tiny stages and platforms "peopled" by moving humanoids and other critters, Lefsrud employs an intentionally crude, ragged sculpting style to highlight how fragile - and flawed - is our relationship with the natural world. And you can play with the art!

Caines' huge oils on canvas depict men interacting with the primal and the primate: a naked man sleeps in the forest while gorillas tickle his toes; a businessman tries to light a smoke in a violent rainstorm; bunnies and monkeys play hide-and-seek on the jungle floor. Caines throws heavy, archetypal symbolism around like a frisbee, but his work is never chicly sardonic. Instead, it is as rich and resonant as dark chocolate on a warm tongue. Caines is a superb painter, the kind who considers and plots every brush stroke, and his sombre monumentalism is a perfect counterpoint to Lefsrud's screwball gimcrackery.

"Pretty pictures are no longer enough"

"Artists provide strong visual challenge" by Doug Bale - The London Free Press, September 28, 1993

Young Contemporaries Exhibition - The show is a model of how art gallery documentation ought to read and all too seldom does. Art curator Barry Lord chose well in putting Keith Alan Rose's painting Small Applause At The Naysayers' Circus on the cover of the catalogue for the London Life Young Contemporaries exhibition.

The show Is a coast-to-coast survey of rising Canadian artists under the age of 30, underwritten every three years by London Life Insurance Co. At the London Regional Art and Historical Museums till Oct.31, it goes to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton n µext spring.

As for art, wherever its place is, it sure ain't where it used to be, Toronto painter Michael Caines declares in three enormous canvases that consign traditional salon painting to the rubbish heap of history. In a work called Nurture, a man cowers on his knees, eyes clenched shut and hands over his ears, as a second man behind him, naked, gleefully swings a club to destroy a beautiful Impressionist-style landscape. A large crude X censors out the club, but can't erase the idea that pretty pictures are no longer enough.

Caines makes the same argument again in The Body Politic, a self-portrait of himself kneeling beside a sleeping naked man, in front of a famous 15th century painting full of cupids and lush female nudes. Caines paints himself as a straggle-haired figure in rumpled jeans, workshirt, sneakers and baseball cap, looking across his friend's hairy, muscled, dirty-footed body toward the gallery viewer as if to ask how Boucher's sugar-coated vision stands up to today's harsh reality.

Homoeroticism is a theme implicit in many of this exhibition's works. Violence is another - violence between the sexes, violence between cultures, violence against nature, and so on. There is a strong trend back toward large paintings, much emphasis on the human figure and a scarcity of abstract art.

“Story taints childhood imagery with sinister overtones”

“Beastly Pair. Two Shows Have Animal Magnetism” by Thomas Hirschmann – NOW Magazine Toronto (2003-05-08)

Caines's new paintings, called History Is No Joke, are a true series in the sense that they seem to reveal a narrative. That story taints childhood imagery with sinister overtones.

He applies muted blue or yellow paint to each canvas, creating a background against which those freaky white bunnies with pink eyes that you usually see in laboratories roam free. Having had enough of testing beauty products for safety, the rabbits rampage against their torturers, burying piles of bones in graves.

Other times they don't wait until the humans are dead, and bury them alive. (After all, we don't wait until they're dead before rubbing chemicals all over them, so it's only fair.) As the bunnies hop amid the gravestones, human arms reach though the dirt in a desperate attempt to haul air back below surface. A particularly weird red-eyed rabbit with big human bosoms nourishes the other bunnies, and an ape retains the ability to find the whole situation rather sad.

...more press reviews to appear here shortly...