A Familiar Change

General Hardware Contemporary
Toronto, 2023

Dan Climan is an artist of exceptional precision. He strives to create work that appears as if it contains no imperfections, working and reworking the canvas to achieve simplified figurations and a consistent economy of line. Climan aims to compel his viewers to self-reflect, describing the scenes in his acrylic paintings as akin to “that moment when we look inward and think about what we want, or think about where we are going”. 

In A Familiar Change, Climan’s latest solo exhibition at General Hardware Contemporary, the artist looks to repetition–what he calls “revisiting”–to examine the desire to return to past memories over and over again in search of a feeling. Whatever this sought after feeling is is up to the viewer to decide. In this way, Climan describes, the viewer starts to notice emotions they can understand but perhaps previously hadn’t considered. 

In Glimpse, an abstract red sculpture occupies the centre of the canvas, sitting in the background nestled between two large hedges dominating the foreground of the work. A terracotta path runs between the hedges and away into the distance, turning from the sculpture and towards a path we cannot see. The red sculpture is a recurring motif in Climan’s work, a symbol whose meaning is unknown and enticing. Perhaps the sculpture functions as a proxy for sticky memories, the ones we can’t quite remember but can’t quite forget. Indeed, Climan routinely presents his work as a psychological space wherein the viewer’s own inner life can be regarded, his paintings serving as an echo of our own psyches.