Imaginary Postcards: Flexi(Ble) Storytelling of a (Lost & Found) Canadian Myth- Making

This essay approaches Flexi’s paintings as ‘imaginary postcards’ designing an ideal map of a certain Canadian collective identity, in fact a ‘cultural cliché’. Conceived for the market and for a series of customers (both locals and travellers), Flexi’s paintings hanged in a variety of places (restaurants, diners, people’s homes, hotels and more) and grew into a peculiar landscape themselves: they became part of an everyday scenario reminding people of what Canada should (ideally) be. Brought together for the first time in the form of an exhibition, these paintings reveal a more complex reality and even convey a reversed message: they show us what Canada in fact, never truly was, if not in imagination or myth-making. One of Marshall McLuhan’s laws of media postulates that each medium pushed to its extreme flips into its reverse. Pushing the Canadian picturesque to its extreme by repeating it almost ad infinitum, Flexi’s imaginary postcards of his paradise on earth flip into an uncanny geography that distracts us and, therefore, hides much from our vista. They create a simulacrum at once pretty and strange, and unfold a fascinating narrative enlightening on our way of reading, interpreting or even simulating a given reality.