Floyd Kuptana
In filling out the canvas with absurdity, the painting leaves no spot on the floor where the disoriented viewer can plant a foot in order to stop the room from spinning.
Not since Knud Rasmussen handed paper and pencil to the Netsilik shaman Anarqâq has the depiction of the spirit world’s arrival in everyday life been as scary as in the 2D work of Floyd Kuptana. Born at the height of the Cold War in the shadow of the Cape Parry DEW Line station, Kuptana lives, as it were, under the sign of impending apocalypse. It is a feeling that pervades many of the paintings and collages, which the artist has added over the last five years to his ongoing body of work in stone. Kuptana’s carvings are well known, featured on the Spring 2008 cover of IAQ and stickered in galleries for five figures. But, to date, these graphic works have been largely dismissed by nearly all commercial outlets. This disparity is striking, for this body of work on paper, wood and canvas boosts the energy, wonder, intensity and strangeness found in the carvings. Take Untitled (2015). The painting depicts in lurid impasto a spiraling star or galaxy as it rotates toward the viewer and begins cutting, like a circular saw, into a cosmic skull, whose lamprey-like teeth seem poised to bleed the universe dry. Devil’s horns and kohl-ringed eyes further flag this spirit’s menace. Kuptana’s palette of gilt, pink and turquoise is, much like the scene, at once seductive, mesmerizing and repulsive. Yet comedy too—that of startling juxtaposition—joins the frame. Two pairs of goofy overlapping creatures fill out the remaining space. Toward the bottom left, two white Janus-faced profiles of indeterminate species, with grossly down-stretched snouts, share an eye. Above these grotesque faces hover two canine muzzles in blue. They too share an eye. In right profile, one has its mouth open. The other, looming into one-quarter left profile from behind the gyrating star is, yes, Charles Schultz’s Snoopy, whose familiar big black nose doubles as the other dog’s mouth. Snoopy is a reoccurring figure in Kuptana’s recent works. In Untitled, comedy does not relieve horror. Rather, it makes the horror a mocking one. In filling out the canvas with absurdity, the painting leaves no spot on the floor where the disoriented viewer can plant a foot in order to stop the room from spinning. Humour works here like an atlatl: though it initially points in the opposite direction to its spear, it greatly enhances the spear’s deadly thrust. For Kuptana, the universe— all giddy and grim—is stacked against us. The shaman Anarqâq was able to wrestle into helping spirits virtually all of the monsters he encountered and later drew for Rasmussen. It remains to be seen whether the Toronto-based Kuptana will be able to do the same with his inspiring daemons. Either way, and even without the galleries, his graphic works situate him within an illustrious canon of boundarybreaking contemporary artists that includes among others the late Jean-Michel Basquiat. Kuptana’s aesthetic universe, however, replete with gritty vibrancy, frenetic colour and a unique visual language suffused with pop culture references, is entirely his own.