Critical Reviews

Toronto Star

Giant ‘squid’ helps gallery build reputation

Alison Smith's Dundas W. gallery has a single work by a mostly unknown artist that looks like a giant squid
By Peter Goddard Special to the Star

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

"Primus Inter Pares: The Ox, The Ass and the Raised Cross” by Nikola Nikola.

Gallery owners believe they’re risk takers, although for many it’s only in their imagination as cure for boredom. But Alison Smith is the real deal.
Her Dundas St. W. gallery has a single work by a mostly unknown artist that looks like a giant squid as fashioned by the great Bernini, the Mannerist sculptor.
And here’s the kicker: The price tag for “Primus Inter Pares: The Ox, The Ass and the Raised Cross” is a cool $125,000. Some squid.

“Maybe it’s because I am newer, I am also stupider,” Smith says. Her knowing laugh suggests that stupid is one thing she is not. She and her husband, writer Larry Gaudet, have owned the building now housing the two-year-old gallery the past four years. They live upstairs with their two boys.
“I don’t even know of kind buyer we are looking for, although AGO curators have been by the gallery,” she goes on. “Surely there must be 100 people in the universe who will fall in love with it. I am optimistic. I just need to find those 100 people. I believe being a gallerist is about taking risks and standing behind something if it is worthwhile.”
“Primus Inter Pares” rises some 2 1/2 meters from floor level. Six sinuous leg-like columns support its central pod element, itself made of maple sanded so smoothly it glows richly even when shown in poor-grade photos.
Attached to each column is a length of hemp rope. Rough-looking balls, varying in diameter, are fixed to the tail end of each strand. Overall the piece suggests vulnerability more than fear. Smith suggests it conjures up ideas of “a kind of milking apparatus.”

As if the work’s gnarly charms aren’t daunting enough for your average art-buyer, there are the gnarly charms of its creator, Nikola Nikola.

Born in the former Yugoslavia, the Canadian artist is entirely at home in a number of mediums. Smith has previously shown his photography, sculpture and paintings. Yet Nikola has inexplicably flown below the radar of the entire Canadian art establishment for most of the almost half-century he’s been creating work in Canada.
Smith herself thinks it has to do with Nikola’s old-school style, out of vogue for decades now. Today’s artists “tend to be nerdy,” she says, with advanced degrees from fine universities and other gentile trappings.
But Nikola is the living antithesis of nerdy. He’s a romantic figure, single-minded and road-tested having travelled the country extensively, picking up work where he could. He worked as a street artist for some time in Québec City and Montreal before moving to Toronto in 1991.
Nikola himself quickly supports Smith’s thesis. “I have always been outside the system,” he tells me. “I really don’t care about fame or institutions. They’re not my goal. My goal is to make art. In that way I am a real rebel. If you join institutions you can’t be a rebel guy, although I am not naïve that I can entirely survive without institutions.”
Smith is an outsider in her own way. Montreal-born and Toronto-raised, she earned her degree in art history at McGill in 1986, then studied fashion design at George Brown, working for a number of Toronto designers in the ’90s.

“Our motivation in getting into the art world, in part, was the opportunity to represent Nikola Nikola,” she says. “We’d followed his career and collected his work for many years.”
Smith’s determination is another factor. She knows she’s been operating a business, not making a gesture during the two years the gallery has been opened. She’s done the art fair circuit here and in Chicago and is now negotiating the rights to exhibit etching by Eduardo Chillida, the late Basque sculptor whose massive works — some weighing in at 70 or 80 tonnes — redefine the word “monumental.”
An idea of Smith’s willpower can be found in husband Gaudet’s wonderfully soulful memoir, Safe Haven: The Possibility of Sanctuary in an Unsafe World. One section describes how the two of them fell in love with the idea of settling in a small seaside town in Nova Scotia, but not with the cold that came with it. On one chilly night it was her icy feet that proved to be the decisive factor in the battle of wills to determine who must leave the bed to light the fire.
In focusing a great deal on Nikola — although not her only artist — Smith is in fact creating a counter-program for the Toronto art market filled with what she calls “Sudoku” galleries, offering “clever puzzles” disguised as art.
Sudoku collectors, she goes on, “are mostly from the hyper-urban, professional and academic crowd, raised on design and media as religion.” Hipsters or former hipsters, “they’re into text-based conceptual art and nothing else except a really good chair with a Swedish degree.”
Nikola is of the same mind. “There is a lot of art that’s disconnected from earthly things,” he says. “Art that’s manipulated through the computer. “Primus Inter Pares” is done from a single piece of wood. All my works are finished in a classic, masterful way. That’s the reason I stay out of the system.”
peter_g1@sympatico.ca