ONTARIO, CANADA.- Dan Kennedy's paintings are collages of recognizable comic characters, story book illustrations, advertising clip art, commercial sign lettering styles and graphics from the 1940's, 50's and 60's. Like a television that has been left on all day, at high volume, his works combine moments of innocent charm with the manic delirium and psychosis of commercial advertising. One is struck by the tart freshness of these images and the jump-cut character of the compositions.  Yet, there  exists here also an intentionally aged and fading quality in which the artist's clip art and truncated sales slogans seem frozen in time.

The paintings in this exhibition have all been created since 1999 and reveal two distinct bodies of work.  Paintings from the Trick series take as their compositional format the conventional advertising poster or signboard, with texts at the bottom and top of the canvases framing a central  illustration.  Kennedy makes reference to and plays with these recognizable formats, seeking to create a layered, visual representation of the voice of the huckster, combining the illusions of the sales pitch, with the pictorial illusions of age in the apparently yellowing varnish and fading green enamels.  Illusionism, Kennedy seems to be saying, is the property of both the artist and the huckster.



A separate body of work is illustrated by the examples Yammerhead and Shack of Deals in which the conventional graphic format of the posters is replaced by dense layers of images and text that seem to float in weightless spaces.  These painted collages conjure a nether world filled with cartoon characters, comic pastorales and fragments of advertising pitches.  The texts in theses canvases resemble a garbled recording of the salesman's shill, where only the superlatives and the false sense of urgency remain.



Dan Kennedy graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1983.  He has received numerous awards from the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.  Kennedy is represented by the Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto, where he has most recently shown his work in the exhibition "Harvest," in December 2001.