If there is work more suited for exhibition upon the walls of the 360: The Restaurant at the CN Tower than this sampling of Toronto artist Pete Dako's new paintings, I cannot imagine what it would be. For here, in this quintessentially round and revolving place, are round and potentially revolvable works: saw-blade paintings, CD paintings, paintings on circular plywood cutouts. Even Dako's more conventionalized square and rectangular paintings on canvas are so teeming with raucous, vital imagistic life, with clamourings of close-packed, cartoonish figures yearning to breathe free in the liberating non-stop space a circular format provides, they seem to be only provisionally square and rectangular-as if they're waiting for the right saucer-shape to drop by and scoop them up.

The art-historical term for a circular, disc-like painting, is the tondo. The form has been around for a long time. Raphael painted a justly famous tondo depicting Mary and the infant Jesus called The Madonna della Sedia. "The incredibly subtle composition", write Renaissance scholars Leopold D. Ettlinger and Helen S. Ettlinger (Raphael, Phaidon, l987), "answers perfectly the challenges offered by the circular format while at the same time appearing completely natural" The Madonna's protective, encircling arms, for example, cunningly echo-and satisfyingly nestle within-the powerful, relentless, imperative curve of the canvas's rounded edge. The Ettlingers also add darkly that "having achieved this, Raphael never worked with the roundel again." The roundel. It's a lovely word, is it not? More lyrical than the rather diminishing, toylike sound of Tondo. How about if we refer to Pete Dako's paintings as roundels from here on in? Raphael may never have worked the tondo format again, but many other artists have, right up to the present time.

In Canada, Quebec abstractionist Claude Tousignant built almost an entire career on his big, round, optically-dazzling Gongs and Chromatic Accelerators, the meaning of which lay in their pure, sheer colouristic bravado. And Ontario artist Tony Urquhart has had frequent recourse to the tondo or roundel form. Indeed, for a book he made in 1985 with the late Canadian writer Matt Cohen called In Search of Leonardo, Urquhart contributed eight delicate watercolours in the tondo format, a format whose central if more or less symbolic place within the experience of seeing itself Cohen addresses on the first page of the book: "Through his spyglass Leonardo sees/ Landscape receding into the future/ Round glimpses of tomorrow/ Compromised by the haze of yesterday." Round glimpses of tomorrow. As in that which is seen-and focussed (that is to say artificially curtailed laterally and deepened vertically) by the telescope's round and selective lens.

What is the tondo's program? What does it require-and allow? Well, in the first place, a disc-like format means that it is almost impossible to compose a picture within it-or certainly not in the traditional way. Because of the disappearance of the comforting vertical and horizontal axes within which conventional pictures are constructed, there is suddenly no top or bottom to the new format. And without a top or bottom to a picture, there is no longer any (albeit illusory) sense of gravitational pull towards the picture's base. Which means, essentially, that whatever you place on a tondo's surface breaks out of the old spatial verities and floats free.

While this might prove a problem for many artists (the tondo form is, after all, not very frequently used), Pete Dako revels in it. For Dako, the tondo provides a hyper-energized space in which his musterings of cartoon characters, slippery graphic runes and equivocal shapes can shriek and tumble and chase each other's tails without spatial restraint. Even in his crowded, graphically intense comic books and chapbooks of cartoon drawings (like his delightful Pete from March 2000), the pages pulse and jostle with so many drawings that his little inky beings are squeezed and pummeled into an omni-directional clamour for space that cries out for the release the tondo can provide.

It was Dako's initial choice of the circular saw-blade as a support for his paintings/drawings that was so fortuitous. Dako's cartoons, the characters through which he lives (plump, rubbery Snoopys, for example, little antennae-headed space beings, fluid cats, big-eyed, bug-eyed birds, owls, cute if demented wolves, a whole whirling menagerie of creatures never dreamed of by Noah), float everywhere in the matrix-wide consciousness provided by the artist's graphic largesse, in the pauseless inventiveness flowing from the end of his fecund pen. They need breathing space. And they get it when Dako empties them out onto a tondo.

But the saw-blade's teeth? Isn't the savage toothedness of the saw-blade antithetical to the innocent spirit with which Pete Dako's are so plentifully imbued? Yes, it is. That's part of the satisfying complexity of these recent works. For here, in these joyous roundels, the benignity of heart which sees the wisdom of battering swords into ploughshares, has here contrived the poignancy whereby the force of these innocent cartoon-drawings has in itself been sufficient to negate, nullify, or at least marginalize (literally), the danger lurking in those potentially ripping, tearing teeth now fringing the circumference of each saw-blade picture. For me, the saw-blade works represent the triumph of vitality (the cartoon content) over an ever-present threat (those metal teeth). There is a sense in which Dako's cartoon figures simply live with the far-flung threat of the encompassing teeth the way all of us resolutely live with everything from bacteria in the water to the tattered ozone layer.

With the CD pictures, the situation is different. Here, the viewer becomes involved with, entangled in, the works' imagery. While the CD paintings maintain the free-floating rapture of roundness, they recede from the brut presence of steel teeth, trading it for a stake in the archetypally powerful human experience of mirroring-of reflectability and reflection. With the CD paintings, a radical graphic intervention on the artist's part into the sanctity of that inviolate artifact the digitally-coded/loaded computer disc or music disc, Dako has freed his characters onto a plane which is a delicately teeming field of information-over which they run gloriously rampant.

What a lovely, childlike disdain there is here for the authority of any externally programmed desire! Just as Dako's saw-blade denizens ignore the serrated edges of their saw-blade world, so do his CD creatures make their mirrored grounds their own, gleefully trampling info beneath their cartoon feet-and inviting you to do the same. The CD paintings are as truly subversive as they are delightful. Because the second we peer into their mirrored surfaces, we too have joined, however briefly, in Dako's bacchanal. And we, too, have been returned, for a moment or two, to ourselves.

Gary Michael Dault

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© Pete Dako, Monday, August 11, 2008 8:45 PM