MICROMAGIE (magie rapprochée)
Geneviève L’Heureux
23 November - 6 December 2023
|
Until December 6, Galerie Institut National Art contemporain presents the exhibition micromagie (magie raprochée), featuring the latest large-format paintings by Montreal artist Geneviève L'Heureux. The body of work presented in this solo exhibition stems from a pictorial research project that Geneviève initiated during her creative residency at the Centre de production en art actuel Les Ateliers in Baie-Saint-Paul (CPAAA) in 2021. The resulting works, exploring notions of shape and color, consist of a dozen abstract paintings in oil, as well as drawings in wood pencil, felt-tip pen and oil pastel. Since 2016, Geneviève has taken a break from cultural management to devote herself fully to painting. Still maintaining an exalted relationship with the use of repetition and motifs, the artist presents works whose approach to organization and pictorial gesture differs singularly from her earlier series. |
With micromagie (magie raprochée), the artist offers a new collection of paintings in intense colors and unexpected arrangements, conveying subtle and distinct details that, while further defining her artistic style, also enrich the aesthetic expression of her paintings.
Negative painting, for example, is an approach she has taken to the creation of her paintings, meaning that it is through the surrounding space, instead of the contour line, that she has realized certain shapes in her compositions. Sometimes repeated, they produce colorful tapestries with intriguing symbols.
This process in her practice is employed by selecting certain parts of her canvases, as if to keep them intact, revealing old layers of paint studded with brushstrokes, like remnants of early versions of her works. This allows the artist to incorporate more variations in flat tints, color and texture, while at the same time offering the public traces of the work's creative process and the freedom to imagine what once existed.
Transformation fuels Geneviève's work: the challenge of making what initially seemed impossible work is a driving force behind creation. For her, the conception of a painting is a process fraught with pitfalls, and she wishes to preserve the traces - even the mistakes. Thus, the creation of shapes using old sections of her paintings is also a means of highlighting a glued brush hair, magnifying a lump or accommodating an unexpected line.
Negative painting, for example, is an approach she has taken to the creation of her paintings, meaning that it is through the surrounding space, instead of the contour line, that she has realized certain shapes in her compositions. Sometimes repeated, they produce colorful tapestries with intriguing symbols.
This process in her practice is employed by selecting certain parts of her canvases, as if to keep them intact, revealing old layers of paint studded with brushstrokes, like remnants of early versions of her works. This allows the artist to incorporate more variations in flat tints, color and texture, while at the same time offering the public traces of the work's creative process and the freedom to imagine what once existed.
Transformation fuels Geneviève's work: the challenge of making what initially seemed impossible work is a driving force behind creation. For her, the conception of a painting is a process fraught with pitfalls, and she wishes to preserve the traces - even the mistakes. Thus, the creation of shapes using old sections of her paintings is also a means of highlighting a glued brush hair, magnifying a lump or accommodating an unexpected line.
Geneviève L’Heureux, "Alluvions", oil on canvas,
60" X 60'', 2023
Deeply inspired by the horticultural world, Geneviève let herself be guided in her creation by the mental representation of surreal combinations of shapes and colors generated by reading the names of Charlevoix plants. Onoclée sensible, trisète purpurine, chimaphile à ombelles; these juxtapositions of unusual, amusing or even personifying words evoked a whimsical imagery in her.
Geneviève is constantly seeking to evolve the forms and gestures she mechanically revisits when creating, as she attaches importance to integrating self-renewing elements into her compositions, ultimately fostering astonishment. It was by dipping into the new "bank of shapes" she had created for herself by drawing every day for a month that the compositions for her future paintings began to emerge.
As well as organizing these shapes, on paper and on the computer, to create dynamic compositions, she also divided her sketches into several other parts. The idea behind this exercise in scaling her drawings was to encourage the observation of selected elements, like a "close-up", hence the name of the exhibition project (micromagie), which means "up close" in photography.
By exploring form in what it can hide, in the microphone, Geneviève sought to accommodate her visceral desire to detail every aspect of a painting - or at least try not to restrict it.
Geneviève is constantly seeking to evolve the forms and gestures she mechanically revisits when creating, as she attaches importance to integrating self-renewing elements into her compositions, ultimately fostering astonishment. It was by dipping into the new "bank of shapes" she had created for herself by drawing every day for a month that the compositions for her future paintings began to emerge.
As well as organizing these shapes, on paper and on the computer, to create dynamic compositions, she also divided her sketches into several other parts. The idea behind this exercise in scaling her drawings was to encourage the observation of selected elements, like a "close-up", hence the name of the exhibition project (micromagie), which means "up close" in photography.
By exploring form in what it can hide, in the microphone, Geneviève sought to accommodate her visceral desire to detail every aspect of a painting - or at least try not to restrict it.