Painter
Le Magasin, Arprim, MontrealLe Magasin is delighted to start this new year by a group show looking back at the last 3 years of editions printed by À l’affiche project.
Thanks to the artists and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau.
Curators: Bruce Grenville, Vancouver Art Gallery Senior Curator and David MacWilliam, artist and Emily Carr University of Art + Design professor
Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting offers an insight into two distinctly different modes of painting that have come to dominate contemporary painting in this country. The origins of both can be effectively traced back to the 1970s, to a moment when the continued existence of painting was hotly debated. Within that debate two new strategies were devised, one that proposed the possibility of conceptual painting—a highly refined notion of painting that emerged from and returned to the idea—and a second, ambivalent proposition that valued actions and materials over ideas—in short, doing and making were pitted against ideas and concepts.
This exhibition traces the legacy of that debate and documents the work of 31 artists who have been largely responsible for the strong revival that painting now enjoys in this country. With work by artists from Halifax to Victoria and many places in-between, this exhibition offers a convincing survey of the lively debate that makes painting relevant and meaningful today.
It is with great pleasure that I am joining the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at Université du Québec à Montréal as Assistant Professor. In addition to enjoying this unique opportunity to develop my practice and to share my passion for painting, I am heartened to join such a wonderful team for the long term. I attach the utmost importance to the spirit of research, the commitment, the generosity and the professional rigor embodied by my future colleagues. I hope to contribute to that spirit for a long time, little by little, growing year by year.
Each piece is created on a very thin sheet of Plexiglas painted on one side before being bent into three sections through thermoforming. Two sections are painted in flat black tints, giving them a mirror-like quality, or in white, which reflects light. The third section is clear and covered in a pattern of translucent dots that seem to break away from the surface, producing the illusion of movement and depth. The folding of the two panels on either side of the central one produces a complex interplay of reflections between the three sections, while the concave shape it creates captures light and multiplies the effect of transparency or distortion within the cluster of dots. The choice of Plexiglas has deepened my research into the materiality of colour and light. The painting’s presentation in the gallery allows viewers to experience their near-sculptural nature as they extend into the exhibition space, and to witness how dramatically their appearance shifts depending on the angle of view.
Choosing to paint exclusively in black and white represented a devious challenge: borrow a constraint from optical painters I admire while using opposite pictorial processes. Therefore, instead of deliberately painting colour patterns, I allowed matter itself to (de)form them. In my most recent project, I used thin flexible plexiglass panels. With my assistant’s help, I covered these supports with fresh paint and manipulated them in order to induce a displacement of liquid paint. The pattern of dots and trails that is generated by this process traces contradictory movements within the painting.
This series of paintings was created using ivory black and titanium white pigments that were diluted with a great quantity of acrylic medium in order to make them translucent. Stimulated by the challenge arising from this constraint, I sought to let an intense visual depth emerge, beyond the simplicity of grayscale. The superposition of a fine coat of liquid color on black or white panels allows the emergence, through transparency, of very peculiar shades of black, brown and gray. A dotted pattern with trails reflects the displacement of paint on a flexible support that was curved. The result is a corpus of works that is both simple and complex, optical and material, controlled and unpredictable.
These paintings were created using exclusively lampblack and titanium white pigments. The pure colors were simply diluted with a great quantity of gloss acrylic medium. By varying their degree of transparency and opacity, I was surprised to see a wide array of grays, with hints of color ranging from blue to brown, appear. Every series was created using a dripping process, which induces a predictable yet unique pattern. I used the various combinations of a color range limited to three shades of black and three shades of white, paying attention to the moments where a unified surface takes shape, while still hinting at the underlying layers below.
Two series of paintings coexist and mingle in the gallery space. The Ellipses en transit are painted drop by drop like the paintings from phase 1, but part of the circular support is left exposed. From one painting to the other, I varied the color order (YCM, CMY, MCY, and so on). The illusions of depth or torsion that appear in the painted ellipse are contradicted by the marked presence of the wooden support, creating a spatial tension. The Flaques are made from a superposition of CMY or CMYK paint drops, of which I altered the transparency. A hint of white paint is often added to the mixture, changing the color tone from light to dark and its materiality from transparent to translucent.
I restricted my palette to the four colors of print: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (known as the acronym CMYK). Paintings are made following a fairly straightforward process: liquid paint is poured drop by drop according to a controlled dripping method. As the paint is being poured, I observe the physical and optical mix of pure colors. For the Tondos CMY en déplacement series, the size of the support varies, but the painted concentric pattern keeps the same diameter. This creates an impression of cropping, which leads to an illusion of volume on some paintings. The Ellipses series shows nine possible variations of CMYK colors. Taken together, those paintings appear as if cut from a virtual pictorial space that would stretch beyond their limit. The two series are hung by aligning the centers of the painted patterns.
Using liquid acrylic paint, I prepared a chaotic mix of three colors (pink, gray, yellow) that I poured drop by drop in a spiral pattern following the edge of the painting. The drops coalesce to create a smooth surface where color varies randomly according to the proportion of colors being used or the way paint is mixed. The regular pattern is set in motion by color. The appearance of the paintings may remind weaving, some effects obtained with image processing software, as well as optical art.
