New and Upcoming:

Within and Without

Galerie Nicolas Robert Montreal, October 20th - December 17th 2022, Vernissage Thursday October 20th
Zalucky Contemporary Toronto, October 22nd - December 17th 2022, Artist in attendance Saturday October 22nd

Within and Without, a single show in two parts, runs concurrently at Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto and Galerie Nicolas Robert in Montreal. Jim Verburg offers a new series of multilayered works revealing subtle geometry, luminous depth, and the transitory nature of perspective.

What is it I am looking at when I encounter the work of Jim Verburg? For me, the question is partly answered by an object from his past, a small wooden cube, possibly of Scandinavian design, rescued from his mom’s yard sale. Was it a paperweight? What was it? I wonder about the somatic resonance it must have for him, once again holding this particular object, a kind of water-damaged totem. “I have an early memory of staring at a candle and at this cube, and feeling perplexed by the idea of heaven—nothing changing, no seasons, everything the same forever—I remember feeling quite anxious about it.” Verburg was raised in the Dutch Christian Reformed Church, and already at the age of five or six found himself in an adversarial relationship with the rigidity of institutional religion. The cube was locked in a kind of adversarial relationship of its own—with the 80’s décor Verburg remembers from his childhood home—and it came to serve as a locus for quiet reflection. Verburg cites the cube as an inspiration for Within and Without. In times of unease, he suggests, it is regenerating to focus on the simplest thing that makes sense.

In the show’s large format works, coloured squares are painted onto sheets of tarlatan—a starched, open weave cotton. Within the frame, geometric forms are layered in a variety of colours and tones—red, yellow and orange; light and warm grey; turquoise, green, and blue. “Ghostly things”, Verburg calls the resulting works. The same heightened focus summoned by a consciousness of the interaction between cube and candlelight is revisited on these surfaces. A blurring of boundaries emerges from the visual chemistry unfolding within. Here, depending on how the shapes are layered, from smallest to largest or vice versa, the initial impression is of an inward or outward movement. Reflecting on these works at length, I am reminded of a quote collected in Verburg’s notes, from In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche: “[Stages of being] have no sharp edges or boundaries, no ends and no beginnings. Everything is continually emerging, changing, transforming, coming forth, and fading out.” Absorbing this into his practice, Verburg himself reflects upon “the idea of a person, a soul, made up of many different layers; living and breathing; influenced and influencing; emanating and changing.”

Subtle complexity doesn’t always photograph well. A camera’s eye, being dramatically less sophisticated than a human’s, stills the action of Verburg’s work by freezing its edges—in this case drawing unavoidable comparisons to Josef Albers—and mutes what seems to be a visual hum operating at the living borders of human perception. In a promotional market dominated by Instagram, it’s a bold statement to produce work that can only be fully appreciated in person. There’s something quite moving about it. Elegantly free of nostalgia, Verburg’s work continually returns me to the present. It’s a kind gesture, and a generous one, providing some humanizing structure for the imagination.

His predilection for the blurring of simple forms results in a generative ‘emptiness’, something Verburg considers to be a kind of spiritual home. Emptiness, as he describes it, is not a void but a key—a state of active receptivity to nuance. “I believe,” he says, “that life is a journey of getting to, or back to, a more receptive and open state.” Within and Without is Jim Verburg’s glowing invitation to join him on that journey.

- Ada Wolters is a writer living in Toronto.