90-second video
Réflexion, couleur et lumière
Sanded, folded and assembled colored acrylic sheets
Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal, from March 30 to April 30, 2022
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 Polyptyque 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