As a painter, Garry Berteig is a religious person. That is to say he is devoted to his practice not only as a simple act of creating material products but also as a spiritual enterprise. In this he seeks not only his own religious awakening but also that of his viewer. He weaves the elements of painting, the images and materials, with a purpose. Berteig maintains that, “The intention of my painting is now and always has been to provide an experience for the viewer that reminds them of the reality of their own soul...in effect to provide a spiritual impact as a result of contemplating the work.” Berteig’s faith in the transcendent nature of art is also the subject of his most recent work, a series of --- watercolours. In these, Berteig explores a new visual direction that combines realism, abstraction and symbolism that revives ideas of beauty and transcendence in a contemporary context.

Each of the pictures in Berteig’s new series features a realistic landscape in a centred band that takes up about half of the picture space. The remaining bands, above or below the landscape image, (or to either side if the work is vertical), are filled with uneven stains and spills of colours that make up the palette of the central landscape image. With this unusual composition, the landscape is framed, as it were, by an abstract or non-realistic space. An almost too neat line, either white or washed in a pale colour, keeps the three areas of the pictures space apart and makes us very aware of the transition between the spaces despite the fact that many of the same colours are used. Finally, Berteig has added another element that defies typical landscape. Fine calligraphic handwriting sprays out across the border areas, sometimes merging and overlapping into the landscape image. The writing seems to lift and float above the scene or fade into the image in a kind of ghostly fashion. When closely examined, the insistent waves of handwriting reveal quotes from the texts of Bertieg’s Bahá’í Faith.

The landscape, writing and abstraction have always been part of Berteig’s painting repetoire. What is new to his approach in this series is the emphasis these works place on realism and the very conscious and obvious inclusion of abstraction right within the same picture space. The overt division and the addition of writing on the picture surface, Berteig contends, are essential to the experience of the work.

Berteig has often found his imagery in the landscape. His new series, however, has led him back to the source. In the summer of 2001, Berteig began taking his paint and paper outdoors where he painted the landscape images on the spot, focusing on a realistic rather than abstracted representation of what he saw. Painting in nature, also allowed him an immediacy he could not find in the studio. Outdoors the painter is engaged not only with the act of painting but with the nature around him in the air he breathes, the temperature, the light and the many discomforts that are attendent to sitting out-of-doors for a lengthy period of time. It is this experience that has brought Berteig to his current focus on landscape and its realistic elements.

Realism, Berteig feels, gives him credibility. Painting the landscape from nature has given his work the authenticity of a real experience. Realism, he notes “is a type of painting that holds the attention of people.” If a “thing look[s] like something in the world then you are believable.” In our world, obsessed with objective observance and proof, “the representational is a form of credibility.” The tangibility of the real is something that everyone trusts.

On the other hand, abstraction as it is seen in the palette area of the painting, “is the way that painting is understood as an external model of an internal condition.” Abstract painting “depend[s] (reflect[s]) more on inner (metaphorical) conditions than on observed outer conditions.” Here we can see the colours and suggestions of forms but no real, tangible images. Instead it is as if the real world has blurred into the unreal. We can only react to it on a subjective and emotive level.
It is the symbolic aspect of the work that ties the two disparate parts – the real and the abstract – together. The symbolic, for Berteig, is literally, “the boundary element.” This he explains is

With his very distinctive composition, Berteig forces the viewer to confront both real and abstract at the same time which puts into question the reality of the landscape portion of the image as much as the significance of the abstract bands. It is in this scission that Berteig feels the viewer experiences the symbolic or transcendental moment.
The leap from realism to abstraction and the recognition of the symbolism of this act is also aided by the calligraphic writing on Berteig’s work. The writing does not necessarily need to be read to understand the symbolic import of the visual experience. Here, Berteig suggests the writing triggers the left-brain functions of cognition so that we understand or take in, on a more intellectual level, the experience of the painting. Just as we read a book to discern its content, Berteig contends we can read a painting. The words are like a shadow across the surface of the image reminding us that in all narratives there is a metaphorical content that can be experienced beyond the realities of the plot or more obvious realism.

It is the metaphorical content or the abstract meaning rather than the realistic images that gives the work its transformative quality. In other words, Berteig would like the viewer to make the leap from the real to the abstract so as to understand something deeper than just the literal beauty of his landscape images. With this proposal Berteig is suggesting that his work, and perhaps all art, relies on the viewer’s ability to transcend the ordinary.

The idea that art provides a transformative experience finds its earliest formulation in the ancient philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. That the transformative experience is a religious one is best defined, however, by the early Christian and medieval philosophers who gave a Christian interpretion to the Platonic ideas of beauty and ideal forms. The early Christian philosopher Dionysus of Areopagite or Pseudo-Dionysus (6th century) and his medieval translator and interpreter John Scotus Eriugenia (9th century) believed that the contemplation of the beautiful led to an analogical or “upwarding leading” experience where the viewer not only apprehended the base beauty of an image but immediately grasped the symbolic and spiritual import of the image. In his book Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, Umberto Eco writes:

For example, influenced by the writings of Dionysus and John Scotus, Abbot Suger (11th century) rebuilt the imperial chapel at St. Denis in Ile-de-France as a religious monument that would lead the Christian believer to a higher level of spiritual contemplation. He filled the church with jeweled chalices and reliquaries and commissioned beautiful stained glass windows that still light the church today. He claimed that the contemplaton of such beauty and splendor with the light of God penetrating through the multi-pieces of coloured glass could only lead one from the “material to the immaterial.”

In his painting, Berteig presents the viewer with the beauty of nature as he found it in his many treks through the Boreal forest of Northern Alberta, the Rocky Mountains or in the northern fjords of Norway. He offers his authentic version, his vision of the present, along with the reminder that this same reality can be admired and appreciated for something greater than the simple expression of what we see. Art, even the most contemporary conceptual work, still relies on this very medieval concept of transcendence. The material, as Abbot Suger, seems to insist is not as important as the immaterial. But Berteig’s work, with its combination of real and abstract, is not so quick to posit one over the other but to say that only in the combined experience of real and abstract can we discover the symbolic, the ideas and beliefs that define our contemporary world.

Marie Leduc
Curator, Keyano Art Gallery
Fort McMurray, Alberta

In 30 years as an artist, Garry Berteig has been engaged in a struggle, the struggle that Martin Heidegger recognized as the true vocation of the artist. Whether as a painter or as an installation-video artist, Berteig has been prolific and indefatigable in engaging viewers in his efforts to achieve a certain truth and authenticity in his work. "Work" as the creative struggle of the artist and "work" as the finished art piece given to the viewer is what the artistic career is all about. Berteig's "work" is found in his prodigious output of over 800 paintings, over 900 works on paper and 13 video installations, all of which exemplify his ongoing process or practice. The thirty works on paper in this exhibit provide a small but cogent picture of this practice and Berteig's struggle to define his world and his truth.

Berteig began working on paper as early as 1968, following his graduation as a sculpture major from the University of Saskatchewan. In the 1970s, he turned to video and multimedia installation work. By 1978, however, Berteig began to paint on paper and canvas, finding in them a more immediate place for his expression. As he painted throughout the 1980s and 1990s, paper became a strong, independent contender to Berteig's large canvases. On paper Berteig works in ink and watercolour, two mediums well suited to this surface. At the same time, he does not hesitate to paint on paper, applying acrylics in thick and thin layers in the same fashion that he would paint on a canvas. On both canvas and paper, Berteig is a master of texture, colour and surface, creating some of the most luminescent images possible on such opaque grounds.

Berteig's method of painting is derived from three distinct sources: abstract expressionism, sculpture and traditional Chinese painting. At the University of Saskatchewan his teachers were Otto Rogers and Warren Petersen, who were active in the Canadian abstract expressionist movement that grew out of the Emma Lake workshops in the 1960s. From his teachers, Berteig learned an intuitive approach to art making and on canvas this meant laying down colour and allowing the image to form as he painted. From his early sculptural practice, Berteig discovered the sensual and physical qualities of surface. Experimenting with the effects of patina and texture on plaster and steel, Berteig established the foundation of his rich and colourful painting style. Traditional Chinese paintings, especially the painting of Ming and Sung dynasties, provided Berteig with the atmospheric spatial definition so prevelant in his work. The depth in Berteig's images is constructed through vertical placement of forms rather than the layering that is typical of Western art. This perspectival device has encouraged a more abstract view of the landscape as well as giving Berteig's work a strong verticality, quite opposed to the usual horzontality of Canadian landscape painting.

The common ground of Berteig's imagery is the landscape. The land looms large and magnificent in Berteig's paintings and is given equal significance in the smaller scale works on paper. Berteig grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, a place where each farmyard was an isolated island on a large sea of land. The expansive vistas of sky and land - punctuated by disruptions caused by climactic conditions, geographic anomalies and human settlement - seem to have imbedded themselves into Berteig's sensibility. In 1984 he travelled to Greenland where he discovered yet another sea, one interrupted by deep fjords and icebergs. The light, the colour, and the primeval nature of Greenland left Berteig with vivid memories that he continually reconstructs in his work. The landscape is also Berteig's most potent metaphor. It is, one might say, both the outside and the inside of his work. As Martin Heidegger writes, an artwork "transport[s] us into the openness and thus at the same time transport[s] us out of the realm of the ordinary." The abstracted landscapes in Berteig's paintings provide an earthly ground we can recognize and feel at home in. At the same time, the image's abstracted form and indefinite structure suggests a more metaphysical and expanded human experience.

Over the years, Berteig has roughly blocked his work into series that have introduced different images into the landscapes. The images were inspired by significant events in his own life - the death of his father, the birth of his children, travels to Greenland and the north. Berteig's strongest and most memorable images are the kite, the meteorite and the iceberg. Berteig develops these images through a constant reworking that is aimed not at a literal translation of form but as a felt response to it. Sometimes this exploration falters but leads Berteig to more significant discoveries. His representation of the human figure, for example, never quite achieves the same assurance as his other images. In Three Central Figures (1969) and To Look is to Worship (1969) the figures, their arms raised as if in worship, are set against vague landscapes marked by a sun or moon and an arching sky. It is the undefined depths of a mystical landscape and the almost clichéd idea of human expressiveness rather than the figures themselves that become Berteig's true and most authentic pursuit. In their naïve simplicity these two works prefigure Berteig's ultimate concentration on landscape and images as expressions of the human condition.

The rich and sensual beauty of Berteig's images cannot go unnoticed. Unabashedly romantic and idealistic, Berteig's art counters the critical anti-aesthetic of post-modernism. Encouraged by the optimistic prophecies of his Baha'i Faith and his study of art, physics, Zen Buddhism and Taoism, Berteig approaches his art as a practice that is essential to his living. It is a practice that is at once poetic and metaphysical. It is also a struggle, as life is, to find the right forms and the right language that will speak for him. Turning the inside out, Berteig offers his sense of authentic being to the world as a gift, one that enacts a critique not through a cyncism toward life but as a passing breath of beauty that reminds us that life is full of hope and renewal.


Marie Leduc
Curator, Keyano Art Gallery
Fort McMurray, Alberta