Russell Banx at Pangée, Montreal

Somewhere in a North American suburb, there is an adolescent escaping into the territory of his dreams. This is a boy of delicate masculinity. He has a soft body and an adolescent slouch. His expression is impassive, almost unreadable. Russell Banx has elaborated iterations of this character throughout the last several years, variations of which he introduces to Gaze and Gesture, a recent series of drawings that depict youth in languid postures of vulnerable yet vacant repose.

What the figures inhabit physically is all surface. Banx is interested in outward form—contour, pattern, shadows, gesture—adopting a realist visual style inspired by German New Objectivity that emphasizes substance and environment. Through this he renders the tedium of suburbia: neat houses in identical rows, dull and quiet settings, domestic inactivity. Yet these physical spaces are also invested with a kind of charge. Banx is not only interested in objective precision and a sober reality—an orientation around the object as an area of visual study—but the possibility of something beyond the observable. His realism is expressive.

In his smooth handling of surface, the pattern of a current is reduced to an essential geometry. The streamlined curve of an underarm extends into the spiral of armchair upholstery. Such suggestive shapes suffuse the temporal world with a spirit that evokes metaphysical questions of space, indicating that objects of experience are more than they appear empirically. In these normally hard, rectilinear surfaces there is an unusual degree of softness; the unreality of the surrounding environments is exaggerated by a rounding of forms.

Banx’s boyish figures dwell in these spaces, lost in inaccessible thoughts. They are detached from their physical experiences, and one is left to wonder where they have psychically gone to. Often sitting, the boys exhibit a demure, at times guarded body language: one foot caught behind another, or a hand reaching protectively around a torso. Neither dressed nor nude, they are endowed with large, puppy-like hands and feet with which they absentmindedly touch delicate objects. Their remote expressions are worn like masks, conjuring a dreamy and emotional distance. Some of the boys almost seem to swoon.

Banx emphasizes drawing as a preparatory act similar to adolescence—an analogous process of maturation—which seems to be embodied in the boys’ feeble postures. The figures appear to be on the cusp of a developing awareness.

A tissue-box appears across several works, the fine material of a single sheet seeming to stand in as a symbol of care, echoed in the filigree of sheer drapes and the pleats of a lampshade. But it is also like a film or a membrane, suggesting a thin veil between the tangible world and the regions of imaginative life—evidence that even within this incredible stillness, there is a world in movement. Certainly there is a psycho-logical tension in Banx’s pictures, despite their quiet, that conveys a communication between matter and spirit.

Text by Sarah Messerschmidt