Marc Garneau: Une Trajectoire - Trajectory
Selected works 1985 - 2015
October 16 - December 20, 2015
The exhibition Marc Garneau: Trajectory presents a selection of works spanning thirty years of the painter’s career. In the 1980s, at a time of the renewed interest in figurative art, Marc Garneau set out to develop his own visual language which is part figurative and part abstract. It is rooted in the paintings of Québec’s Automatiste movement and American Abstract Expressionism.
For Garneau, his paintings are sites of creative experimentation where collage elements are strongly present His works are composed of various surfaces, fragments of previously discarded paintings, torn up paper, pieces of burnt wood that he incised, gouged, or layered, and other found objects.
Garneau often sets aside the painter’s brush and uses the tools of the carpenter (a trade he has practised). He uses, for instance, chisels on the wood to carve, gouge, and incise it. He also burns wood to achieve the desired burned effect.
The artist not only explores the technical possibilities of the tools he uses but also sees this as an opening of a door to the unforeseeable. He states:
“I work by contradiction. Always. What I think is one thing, and what I do is a continuation of the thought, not its application. I try to provoke something unexpected. That’s what gives me the energy to surprise myself.”
His exposure to rural life inspired many works using fire, as in his painting Rituel (Ritual) that you can see on the right side in the photo below. In it, the wood was treated, burned, and gouged to reveal its layers.
According to Garneau, each each of his paintings develops out of its own tensions and contrasts, within a body of work that comes together as a cohesive, coherent whole.
Garneau said that the way he often worked was to tear up an old canvas and to leave the pieces on his studio floor. When returning the next morning and seeing how they were arranged, he would right away start having ideas how and where to use them in his new creations.
Click on images to enlarge them.
Hover your mouse over images for description and credits.
1700 La Poste is a private space dedicated to visual arts. It presents events in the form of exhibitions and lectures. It is housed in a former Postal Station F, built in 1913, that was originally conceived by the architect David Jerome Spence. It is located in Montreal's Griffintown, 1700 Rue Notre-Dame West. The building was fully restored a century later, thanks to private financing from Isabelle de Mévius, and the vision of the architect Luc Laporte.
For more information, visit the 1700 La Poste website.
The admission to the exhibition if free.
No comments:
Post a Comment