There is No Limit to the Line explores a range of strategic approaches to mark-making—works by 20th century European and Canadian artists from the McMaster collection—presented as counterpoint and complement to the concurrent survey of Shelagh Keeley drawings, and Alexander Pilis’ The Blind Architect Meets Rembrandt, which examines the modernization of vision.

This mark-marking is expressed primarily as drawing, but not exclusively, and best characterized as process and an act of the mind rather than a means to represent the world of things. The selected works embrace constructivist and systemic tendencies, minimalist and aleatorical actions (elements of chance and order), the gestural and the conceptual. A quote from Michael Harrison, writing on the work of British artist Kenneth Martin (1905-1984), and included in the exhibition), provides an apt and useful observation: “Martin saw a work of art not as a personal expression but as the outcome of a sequence of actions; and a step-by-step method served him well. A day’s work would not then depend on mood or the inspired moment…but concentration on something happening outside himself [yet related] to a common experience of life.”

The exhibition includes works by Harold Cohen, Jean Dubuffet, Leo Erb, Richard Gorman, Nigel Hall, John Heward, Roger Hilton, Wassily Kandinsky, Jannis Kounellis, Liliane Lijn, Kenneth Martin, Guido Molinari, Nicholas de Staël, Mashel Teitelbaum and Serge Tousignant.

I always admired de Chirico paintings—they were so quiet, and I love the silence, and wanted to make it visible. Since I did not want to become an imitator, I found my way in the shadow. If you put two cubes together, it creates a shadow and new forms. I have worked only with structure and light, and without colour, to achieve a plasticity of form. But the systemic without poetry is not art.
- Edited excerpts from Leo Erb interview, 2002-2003

[The aquatints] were based on drawings I made over a long period, all focused on “understanding” flow. How, in other words, identical marks relate to each other in space and tend to form structures, to self form [without] intention on my part to form them. These drawings are almost like knitting because each mark is a link in a chain or assembly of marks that leads somewhere. Where exactly one cannot determine in advance and can only control with great difficulty if at all.
- Liliane Lijn 2009