What kind of art might you make if you lived in Winnipeg? Bear in mind this is a place with a flat, featureless landscape which is hot and brown for much of the summer and 40 degrees below for months on end during the winter.
Marcel Dzama, who lived there all his life until his recent move to New York, has evidently been thrown back on his own devices.
His childlike watercolour drawings in a limited range of reds, greens, blues and browns show figures free of any landscape background, apart from trees from which people are often seen hanging.
For what at first glance seem like arcadian fantasies with their rural communal gatherings have a distinctly sinister underside - though you may have to scan a composition almost completely from left to right to find some shocking act of violence going on.
This is a primitive, dreamlike world haunted by monsters, half-human, half-animal. It's a stream of Goya-esque consciousness, and in fact the scattered body parts which adorn a tree in one drawing are a direct reference to Goya's Disasters of War.
Still, for all the allusions to horror, Dzama is a much more playful artist, as the pages from his notebooks make clear. So do his extremely low-tech videos, for which lifesized costumes for his mysterious characters, such as The Bear Suit Lady and Papa Croc, were made.
Shown as sculptures in the exhibition, these strike a comic rather than sinister note.
The longer I spent w ith Dzama's work, the more I found myself liking it, and the more I was drawn into its strangely ambiguous world - part-jape, part-nightmare - which somehow seems true to its geographical remoteness.
Ignasi Aballi's exhibition has already been attacked by a tabloid newspaper with no interest in art, which naturally makes you want to like it.
His piece Waste (2001/5) consists of 15 large cans of industrial paint with the lids removed and neatly stacked in a pile. As the paint has halfevaporated, you could say this is a piece about watching paint dry.
Other works in the show are parallel exercises in seeming pointlessness. A series of black rectangles shows how far a printer cartridge will go, while a series of lists links unconnected newspaper stories referring to numbers of artists or people of different nationalities (the latter, with its juxtapositions of "Un kurdo", "150 romanos" and "3,000,000 britanicos", struck me as funny, though I might be hard-pressed to explain why).
Well, it's another grind of the minimalist mill but what makes me impatient with it is the sense that Aballi is too intimidated to actually dip a brush in the paint or express an opinion about anything.
They might be slightly crazy, but give me Marcel Dzama's visual ramblings any day. n Until July 16 (Tue-Sun 11am-6pm).
Terry Grimley
