Joanne Tod’s six colorful portraits greet visitors at the YYZ Gallery in an efficient and business-like manner.  They are pictures of diplomacy. The paintings are hung at discreet and regular intervals around the exhibition space and are undeniably linked because of the standardization of size and content. These pictures show Mao Tse Tung at various times over the last years of his life shaking hands with visiting dignitaries.  The backdrop for all these summit talks seem to be one clean, anonymous room, presumably somewhere in Peking.  Although this blank setting changes in every picture from one high key hue to another, the effect is always the same.  All attention is focused on reading their nuances of expression on the faces of the portraits.  This turns out to be a game with numerous results.  Invariably, the participant politicians are smiling at the inscrutable, scrutinizing Mao.  As polite and silent witnesses, we try to decipher Nixon’s used car salesman smile or Julie and David Eisenhower’s clumsy country club grins.  One is not quite certain whether Mao really knows all and sees right through his distinguished guests’ diplomatic facades, or whether he is just having a hard time remembering their names. Mao could be a sage or a senile civil servant as he swims through these affairs of state.  It is up to the viewer to decide, for Tod has presented her images in as bland and unsentimental a manner as the documentary, newspaper-type photographs they are based on.  This is not to imply that the paintings can only be assessed on the level of image recognition.  The functional use of pattern and vivid colour allows an appreciation of their decorative qualities as well.  Not a heady romantic decoration, that makes active sensual demands of the viewer, but a cooler, more passive decoration, something akin to a large and expensive color television set. There is no «angst» to be found in these pictures, only a well honed sense of ironic detachment.  For what it’s worth, they exist comfortably, perhaps a little smugly, causing no controversy, but getting the job done, using a technique somewhere between «art for art’s sake» and social realism. With a cool air of elegant ambiguity, Tod’s portraits play cliché against cliché with discretion and taste.

David Clarkson, «Joanne Tod», Artists Review, April 11, 1979, 2-3.