Over the course of the exhibition, Inside, Toronto artist Dorian FitzGerald periodically worked in the gallery on a poured cloisonné diptych painting depicting a sumptuous Parisian sitting room. The source for Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris is a two-page photographic spread in the October 1989 issue of Architectural Digest. The photograph accompanies a retrospective article celebrating 1970s-era internationally acclaimed collaborative interior designers Rybar and Daigre. In FitzGerald’s view of the lavish interior we see several times over—due to the mirrored paneling on the room’s walls and ceiling—a gilded Regency mirror, a Roman portrait bust, two Louis XV chairs, and many other objets d’art.

FitzGerald explores images of lifestyle excess and the display of ostentatious wealth in many of his paintings, Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar included. He dissects and compresses these images through digital contour tracing using raster or vector graphics. FitzGerald sets the complexity of this contour analysis to produce a digital drawing that looks like an overly intricate paint-by-number sketch that he transfers onto his painting. He then either traces a contour line around a shape with caulking to create a reservoir area or teases paint up to the edge of each shape with an awl. He applies the liquid acrylic paint using squeeze bottles with superfine nozzles used for silk painting. For this exhibition, if FitzGerald is not at work in the gallery, we encounter his squeeze-bottle palette and other tools set out on a platform that he uses to suspend himself over the painting.

FitzGerald’s palette of 42 colours is digitally determined based on his analysis of several divergently printed copies of the October 1989 Architectural Digest that he purchased on eBay. The compressed image, the restricted palette of tinted blacks, mahoganies, and golds all transform and degrade the image, suggesting endless reproduction and circulation of carefully crafted veneers of the good life. FitzGerald is also mindful of his own complicity in elite consumerism by producing museum-scaled artworks, suggesting an oblique critique of contemporary painting and the art market.