Rosemary Heather

If you ask Toronto artist Ron Giii, the continuities that defy and define the present are “the anti-matter of materials that exist in an unknown dimension called invisibility.” The above quote is from a text written by Giii for a show of his drawings he presented in New York City in 1986. Even in just this fragment from the artist’s writings there is so much to discuss; as in his work as whole: depth-mine and you will discover riches.

Giii’s art forms itself at the point where the invisible meets the visible; another word for this is the theatre, which is like visual art in that it takes place within a framework or proscenium arch. Theatre is the forum where anti-matter becomes visible, precisely because the primary consideration of art is form. In Giii’s case, artistic form and the forum of its presentation converge in a way that is especially distinctive. To quote the sentence in full: “The Atomic Theatre takes its pulse from the anti-matter of materials that exist in an unknown dimension called invisibility.”

A wholly coherent statement about the artist’s oeuvre, the text offers a way to consider the stages of Giii’s career. What began as performance continues as drawing, all of it taking place within the conceptual framework of theatre. In Giii’s view, the theatre is an idea that formalizes the process of becoming that is all of our lives. Like any one of us, the figure within the frame or on the stage, looks outwards, seeks a connection with others and beckons to an audience, more often than they turn their back to the world. The proscenium, like the page, is a threshold of possibility waiting for the moment of its apprehension.

Looking at Giii’s work, one understands that the simple encounter is his fondest hope for it. The drawings live on the page and shimmer with unimagined sensitivity. In The Atomic Theatre, he speaks about the figures in his drawings as real people, “laughing and hiding from me as if they had their own reality.”

When I curated a show of Giii’s work for the Doris McCarthy Gallery in 2007, I asked him to suggest a title for the show. From the pages and pages of ideas Ron sent me, I selected Hegel’s Salt Man, a title that is inscrutable and perfectly descriptive at the same time. The Salt Men are six mummies who were discovered over a number of years (from 1993-2005) in a salt mine in northern Iran. An archeological discovery of great significance, the Salt Man could also be the sole figure that appears, over and over again, in Giii’s drawings. Each drawing—Giii has produced 100s and 100s of these—stages the figure’s appearance; each successive drawing implies his reappearance again. Seen together like this, as body of work that Giii continues to produce, ongoing for over 35 years now, he creates a conceptual analogy for life itself: continuous, dissolving, persistent.

This text is adapted from the longer essay Ron Giii: Hegel’s Salt Man, written by the author on the occasion of a career survey of Giii’s work at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in 2007.