Forever young: ‘The Contemporaries’ return with first show in years at McMaster

The Young Contemporaries find themselves convened again after many years, by special order of their own historical importance, in a return to the cradle of their creative awakening.

The legendary art collective is back on campus, the scene of the crime, so to speak, of their origin story, 40 years ago, at the invitation of alma mater McMaster. They're there in order to, among other things, take a bow. Those other things might include a kind of completion of the circle that began there and, one hopes, the reaching of a new audience, the start of a new circle. (And I did see evidence of that, of which more soon.)

As a famous quote once suggested, the goal of all our striving and exploration may be simply to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

So here they are, old work and new, in a retrospective/prospective at McMaster Museum of Art called The Contemporaries: This Must Be the Place."

They started as The Young Contemporaries, but to reflect the passage of time and, I suppose, to pre-empt snickering, they dropped the Young, like Crosby, Stills and Nash did when it no longer applied.

No it's just The Contemporaries. But to some of us they will always be young.

They are/were: Ferdinando (Fred) Bilanzola (1956-2001), Judi Burgess, Raffaele Caterini, Paul Cvetich, John Kinsella, Janice Kovar, Paul Ropel-Morski and Lisa Wohrle.

It was the mid-1980s when they planted their brazen, torn T-shirt of a flag on the high promontory of Hamilton's art future.

In This Must Be the Place," that era is revisited in a time capsule room, carved out of the larger exhibition space.

It was a time ... well, I'll let Paul Lisson and Fiona Kinsella of Hamilton Arts & Letters online magazine take over (they wrote the terrific introductory notes to the show):

Second-hand suits, skinny ties, tapered pants, pierced ears, safety pins. The advent of New Wave with Punk strongly in the mix ... At every street corner, hydro poles plastered with posters for Hamilton's Teenage Head, Forgotten Rebels, The Florida Razors, The Shakers. By the mid '80s McMaster Fine Art Parties ...

It was during this time that a group of art school students embraced the freedom of McMaster's bunker art studios; minds gestating with the potency of ink, pigment, pencil shavings, turpentine, warm wax."

Gestating indeed. They would sleep in the studios. They came out of Mac fine arts' birth canal like octuplets.

Everyone was talking about them. The Young Contemporaries had a way. Their way. They put on do-it-yourself shows. Did conventional galleries not know what to do with them? This was not Robert Bateman? Well, they'd mount themselves.

Places like The Hammer, The Broadway. Their shows were events."

The parties. The chemistry. They were irresistibly charismatic. Even their professors told them that. Were they close? Two marriages emerged from the group.

And the art. It broke ground. It broke rules.

Their art was a picture of their world, especially the Hamilton of that time, a world rubbed raw to the point of blistering. They painted people in leather and chains, in squalor, on the streets, in dingy rooms.

They captured - but not without humour - the idiosyncratic desperation that shaped much of this industrially twilit, franchise-starved city, in an age of dawning aware-nesses - AIDS, nuclear paranoia, homelessness, activism.

We're struck even now by John Kinsella's The Revenge of the Killer Earrings" - two men dangling from a woman's lobes allegorically working a crosscut saw across her neck. Kinsella's work has evolved into supersaturated, glowing landscapes, so auroral and gloriously lit, so perfectly painted they seem meditative, almost surreal.

There is Judi Burgess, painting onto our nerve endings her oracular, quasi-bureaucratic, gorgeously serpentine visions of some strange, perhaps apocalyptic, other-verse, at once exotic, magic and mundane.

Lisa Wohrle, then and now, is like a Toulouse-Lautrec (not so much stylistically but as chronicler/observer), then of our '80s club scenes and grease chain bicycle culture, now of our backyard barbecues and every day faces, her work impressively painterly and accomplished, for all its edge.

Raffaele Caterini epitomizes the group's jumble of trained virtuosity with the unexpected, sometimes confrontational. In this show one work features excellent Renaissance-like painting on a canvas from which juts a small wooden shelf holding an actual can of RAID bug killer.

The late Fred Bilanzola is here with his powerful Expressionistic low prole tableaux, haunting and, again, so painterly, as is so much of The Contemporaries' work. In one, two men are talking at a table and the smoke from cigarettes joins in a birdlike shape, a young boy lying under the table.

Janice Kovar's work here shows such strong continuity with the past and fidelity to her abstract exploration of surfaces, material, line, colour and disintegration.

Paul Cvetich's work is more gestural abstraction, with sharp dramatic turns but also sculptural, like Kovar's boxes. Cvetich is the artist who did the famous headless, vaguely Christ-like memorial to injured workers sculpture in front of city hall.

Paul Ropel-Morski's contribution is his exuberant play of vibrant colour and biomorphic surrealism, with shapes that suggest both geometry, organic matter and landscape and again one can trace the robust thread to his earlier work.

So does it feel like the first time?

As I spoke to the artists, they laughed and reminisced about faculty like George Wallace, Judy Major-Girardin, Hugh Galloway and others. They hadn't had a show together since 2015 and not for nearly two decades before that.

A large class of university students came through when I was there.

It was so fun and enjoyable, I learned a lot," said student Gemima Mukendi.

A thanks to museum director/curator Carol Podedworny for affording this opportunity to acknowledge The Contemporaries. On until March 5. Artists' talk Feb. 15 starting at 12:30 p.m., McMaster Museum of Art.

Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator.jmahoney@thespec.com