Vintage plaid furniture encourages deep listening to The Government\u2019s deceptively flippant lyrics and to tracks by Derwatt, Paterson\u2019s more recent musical collaboration with Kevin Dowler. The latter band name references the deceased painter at the centre of an art-forgery ring in Patricia Highsmith\u2019s psychological thriller Ripley Under Ground<\/em>. Pulp-fiction clich\u00e9s have been a sustaining fascination for Paterson, a renowned cinephile with eclectic taste that runs to the sunshine noir. In Immortality <\/em>(1987), a video whose irreverent recycling of genre conventions harkens back to his no-wave roots, Sunset Boulevard<\/em>\u2019s iconic aging star Norma Desmond is reimagined as the chameleonic Norman Desmond. Screened as part of a nonstop 180-minute program synched to the gallery\u2019s opening hours, Immortality <\/em>is replete with the baroque referentiality and narrative hairpin turns that are signatures of Paterson\u2019s early output.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Andrew James Paterson<\/strong>
Never Enough Night,<\/em> exhibition views, the plumb, Toronto, 2024.
Photos: courtesy of the plumb, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The sharp-tongued verbal play of Rectangular World <\/em>(2006) is representative of Paterson\u2019s more recent exploration of the social discontents of modernism as filtered through an echo chamber of art-world chatter. Paterson\u2019s thrifty wordsmithing is perfectly attuned to the funky geometry of paintings and videos that nimbly unsettle formalism\u2019s restrictive claims on abstraction. This reductive turn is on full display in lists that take their inspiration as much from the vernacular conceptualisms of alt-rock lyrics and joe-job inventories as from high-art prototypes, including Lettrism and the nouveau roman<\/em>. Paterson\u2019s ultimate foray in list-making is the cut-vinyl My Memoir! <\/em>(2023), which compresses his storied biography into a terse succession of cryptic notations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Andrew James Paterson<\/strong>
Never Enough Night,<\/em> exhibition views, the plumb, Toronto, 2024.
Photos: courtesy of the plumb, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Yet he has also demonstrated a mastery of long-form prose in his novels The Disposables <\/em>(1985), a neo-noir mashup of Foucault and Hitchcock published by General Idea\u2019s AA Bronson, and Not Joy Division <\/em>(2018), a musical reimagining of Highsmith\u2019s conspiratorial Derwatt Ltd. as a social media suspense thriller. These and other publications join ephemera documenting Paterson\u2019s prolific output across media and genres that spill out of vitrines onto the gallery\u2019s walls in a spellbinding montage. Presiding over this archival flotsam and jetsam are two electric portraits of a young Paterson by the late Expressionist painter Rae Johnson. Long touted as a pillar of the Queen West art scene in its heyday, Never Enough Night <\/em>reveals a Paterson who has outlived his early no-wave provocateur image to make significant contributions to artist-run culture in Toronto. It is this spirit of generosity that makes his retrospective such a timely fit for the community-building ambitions of the plumb, whose driving DIY ethos is a welcome tonic in a moment defined by institutional equivocation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With a PhD from the University of Toronto earned in 2016, Adam Lauder has taught courses on Canadian art at OCAD University and the University of Toronto. In 2018, he organized an exhibition of Rita Letendre\u2019s public art at YYZ Artists\u2019 Outlet.<\/p>\n\n\n
Adam Lauder, Andrew James Paterson<\/div>
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