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Exhibition Tons, teintes, nuances - Guido Molinari Foundation - March 2 to May 28, 2023

Invitation Tons Teintes Nuances

Guido Molinari Foundation
3290 St. Catherine Street East (at Darling)
Montreal, Qc H1W 2C6

Exhibition: March 2 to May 28, 2023
Opening: March 2, 17h

This exhibition is the result of a residency of five Montreal artists (Karine Fréchette, Nicolas Grenier, Luce Meunier, Ianick Raymond and Julie Trudel) who have made colour a central aspect of their practice. Nouveau genre abstractionists, they readily admit that their relationship to colour is everchanging, influenced by the current chromatic landscape generated by nature, manufactured objects, natural and artificial lighting or that of screens.

Their artistic practices are considerably varied; yet the group shares a penchant for experimentation, hybridity and questioning the distinctions between painting and sculpture. United by the desire to capture the elusive character of color, they pursue research similar to the very concerns of the Plasticiens.

Come and participate in the dialogue created between the unpublished works of these five artists and the paintings of Guido Molinari.

The Foundation and the artists would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Montréal for their support.

In residency at Guido Molinari Foundation

In January and February, I am in residency at Guido Molinari Foundation to develop the exhibition Tons, teintes, nuances : le point de vue du peintre, with fellow painters Karine Fréchette, Nicolas Grenier, Luce Meunier and Ianick Raymond. I will show new artworks created in collaboration with stage designer Nancy Bussières, my partner in the recent Matière lumière project.

Opening: Thursday, March 2, 2023, 17h à 20h
Exhibition: March 2 to May 28, 2023

Group exhibition Un Soleil - Maison de la culture de Verdun - July 9 to Sept. 25

Julie Trudel, Polyptyque spécifique (détail), 2022. Photo : Alex Pouliot

Un Soleil Quai 5160 – Maison de la culture de Verdun July 9 to September 25, 2022 Maija Annikki Savolainen, Jaakko Mattila, Erik Nieminen, Julie Trudel

‘Un Soleil’ Writer: Mojeanne Behzadi

“Plunging ever more deeply into winter and night, I wander through my faery palaces of light. Another sun rising in my heart, I awaken a spring within, warming the world with the fires of imagination.” – Charles Baudelaire “Landscape” translated into English by James McColley Eilers (2010)

Light is a source. It is a source of existence, spirituality, science, thought, and creation. This exhibition brings together the work of four artists who connect in their exploration of light as a way to bring to the surface phenomena that are otherwise invisible, infinitesimal, and mysterious. Jaakko Mattila, Erik Nieminen, Maija Savolainen, and Julie Trudel work in a range of mediums and yet each is invested in working through different materialities that reflect light as a way to examine what perception systems reveal about sunlight and its properties.

Through meticulous examination and rigorous method, each practice reveals an invisible layer of reality just beyond reach that awakens endless possibilities. Here, the artists draw from contemporary technologies as well as timeless principles and processes to expand our field of perception and widen our access to phenomena, both natural and manufactured. Through mediated light, the works propel us into another world, under another sun. The electromagnetic spectrum and its chromatic aspects are here explored through both abstract and figurative painting, photography, and installation in a stimulating visual conversation between the artists whose individual practices playfully nod to one another and present new paths for exploration and creation.

In his paintings, Jaakko Mattila uses techniques of illusion to highlight and heighten humans’ limited chromatic experience. His latest watercolours present almost invisible tones that add a spectral presence to the otherwise bright white medium. His approach evokes a spectral field of vision, on the dark side of the moon.

Colour is the focus of Julie Trudel’s paintings, through the use of unique processes and specific materials. In her latest series, she achieved 3D paintings transmuted by light through the use of fluorescent Plexiglas as support, overlapping its colour with that of the walls and of discreet paint gradients.

In her practice, Maija Savolainen is interested in the photographic process as a series of gestures through which light is transformed from one state to another. Through her work, she explores this process of light reactivity using photography, plants, robotics, and text, showing the interconnectivity of both objects and living things and their respective ways of receiving light.

By experimenting with casting light on various plastics and transparent materials out in the world, Erik Nieminen begins his paintings through an exploration of the patterns and shapes and colours that projected light reveals. These initial moments of aesthetic interest intuitively guide the direction and content of each of his compositions. He also uses fragments of photos and videos in this process, creating alternate realities, at once figurative and abstract.

Exhibition Matière lumière - Salle de diffusion de Parc-Extension, June 30 to August 21

Salle de diffusion de Parc-Extension
421, rue Saint-Roch, Montréal
June 30 to August 21, 2022

Opening : Wednesday June 29, 5 PM
Artist talk and book launch  : Saturday August 20, 1 PM

L’installation Matière lumière présente une nouvelle forme artistique, fruit d’un croisement entre peinture, sculpture, art lumineux et scénographie. La peintre Julie Trudel et la scénographe Nancy Bussières allient leurs expressions artistiques pour créer un langage hybride fait de matière et de lumière. Les partitions lumineuses révèlent, masquent ou amplifient la présence physique des tableaux, au point d’amener le regard à découvrir des univers cachés au sein de la matière-couleur. Dans la salle d’exposition tamisée, les œuvres s’animent lentement ou rapidement, entrainant la suractivité rétinienne du visiteur, dont l’œil n’a de cesse de s’adapter au changement. Il est pris par surprise. Le subtil se joint au complexe pour exacerber les sens; tout fait sens! – Émilie Granjon, commissaire de l’exposition

Thanks to : Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Hexagram-UQAM, Faculté des arts de l’UQAM, École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQAM, Galerie de l’UQAM, Arprim, centre d’essai en arts imprimés.

Residency at Hexagram-UQAM - May 2 to 13, 2022

May 2 to 13, I will be in a creation residency at École des arts visuels et médiatiques, UQAM, with the professor, scenographer and light designer Nancy Bussières. We will finish our « Matière lumière » project, in which Bussières creates light scores for my paintings. This project is supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Hexagram-UQAM et Faculté des arts de l’UQAM. It will be presented at Salle de diffusion de Parc-Extension, Montreal, from June 22 to August 21, 2022.

Solo exhibition Galerie Hugues Charbonneau - March 30 to April 30

Trio de triangles, 2021. Photo : Alex Pouliot

Réflexion, couleur et lumière
Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal
March 30 to April 30, 2022
Opening : March 30, 4 to 7PM

Material, volume, colour, light. These are the core components in Julie Trudel’s practice. In contemporary terms, there’s a link here to the elemental concerns and exploratory geometries of Minimalism. (The work of Donald Judd, for example, is a key reference for Trudel.) Yet, Trudel’s shaped, sculptural forms, whether wall-mounted or freestanding, channel these perceptual elements into works that expand beyond the fundamentals. It’s a process as deeply informed by her sensitivities as a painter as it is by an abiding curiosity in both the technical complexities and expansive potential of form and luminosity. Consider the triptych Triptyque spécifique, where thin surface layers of backing paint and mirrored coating have been selectively removed from industrial-grade, coloured Plexiglas panels, which are then set in triangular compositions that extend horizontally from the gallery wall. Or Polyptique spécifique with its heat-molded lengths of red, blue, and yellow mirrored Plexiglas rising from the gallery floor in a screen of accumulated form. Ambient light is the active agent, seeping through and reflecting off Trudel’s angular surfaces and open volumes to create luminous plays of colour and shadow in varying intensities (Trudel calls it “painting without paint”) while at the same time implicating the viewers in their own mirrored presence. Think of these, perhaps, as a series of experimental proposals or studies in compositional contradiction, where the infinite becomes finite, and the finite becomes infinite. — Bryne McLaughlin

Group exhibition "Un Soleil" - Nov. 12 to Jan. 16

Un Soleil
Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce

November 12, 2021 to January 16, 2022

Meet the artists: Saturday, November 13, from 2PM to 5PM
Maija Annikki Savolainen, Jaakko Mattila, Erik Nieminen, Julie Trudel

‘Un Soleil’
Writer: Mojeanne Behzadi

“Plunging ever more deeply into winter and night,
I wander through my faery palaces of light.
Another sun rising in my heart, I awaken a spring within,
warming the world with the fires of imagination.”
– Charles Baudelaire “Landscape” translated into English by James McColley Eilers (2010)

Light is a source. It is a source of existence, spirituality, science, thought, and creation. This exhibition brings together the work of four artists who connect in their exploration of light as a way to bring to the surface phenomena that are otherwise invisible, infinitesimal, and mysterious. Jaakko Mattila, Erik Nieminen, Maija Savolainen, and Julie Trudel work in a range of mediums and yet each is invested in working through different materialities that reflect light as a way to examine what perception systems reveal about sunlight and its properties.

Through meticulous examination and rigorous method, each practice reveals an invisible layer of reality just beyond reach that awakens endless possibilities. Here, the artists draw from contemporary technologies as well as timeless principles and processes to expand our field of perception and widen our access to phenomena, both natural and manufactured. Through mediated light, the works propel us into another world, under another sun. The electromagnetic spectrum and its chromatic aspects are here explored through both abstract and figurative painting, photography, and installation in a stimulating visual conversation between the artists whose individual practices playfully nod to one another and present new paths for exploration and creation.

In his paintings, Jaakko Mattila uses techniques of illusion to highlight and heighten humans’ limited chromatic experience. His latest watercolours present almost invisible tones that add a spectral presence to the otherwise bright white medium. His approach evokes a spectral field of vision, on the dark side of the moon.

Colour is the focus of Julie Trudel’s paintings, through the use of unique processes and specific materials. In her latest series, she achieved 3D paintings transmuted by light through the use of fluorescent Plexiglas as support, overlapping its colour with that of the walls and of discreet paint gradients.

In her practice, Maija Savolainen is interested in the photographic process as a series of gestures through which light is transformed from one state to another. Through her work, she explores this process of light reactivity using photography, plants, robotics, and text, showing the interconnectivity of both objects and living things and their respective ways of receiving light.

By experimenting with casting light on various plastics and transparent materials out in the world, Erik Nieminen begins his paintings through an exploration of the patterns and shapes and colours that projected light reveals. These initial moments of aesthetic interest intuitively guide the direction and content of each of his compositions. He also uses fragments of photos and videos in this process, creating alternate realities, at once figurative and abstract.