|
Sylvian Bouthillette
: Thursday, March 4 at 6 pm
: March 5 to 27
: Thursday, March 11 at 7 pm
Sylvain Bouthillette’s work emerges out of a meditative process and the adoption of a certain lifestyle, especially when it comes to questions of aesthetics. His work seeks to place us in a space that encourages us to see things anew, from a point of view that is, at one and same time, intelligent, cutting and constantly curious.
The McClure Gallery is pleased to feature recent works by Montreal artist Sylvain Bouthillette. The exhibition includes large format paintings and smaller silkscreen prints, all of which continue to explore the artist’s signature vision: the interplay of a rich panoply of popular imagery with spiritual content and considerations; Bouthillette has been studying and practicing Buddhism for over a decade. The result is a painterly cosmogony that is both “in your face” – forceful, provocative – and aesthetically sophisticated.
Bouthillette’s painterly world is destabilizing. In several of the new works, he depicts a holographic geometry of space using a variety of compositional strategies. We are simultaneously propelled through warped time as we are pinned down, unable to budge. Much of his lexicon of images plays out on this shifting ground. He creatively recycles elements of his iconography – here, a strange gathering of squirrels or swarms of bees. Two phrases recur in the work like mantras. The words, “Laissez tomber la tête dans le cœur, le cœur dans le ventre et remontez le tout dans le coeur” swirl around or between the loosely painted oversize bodies of bees or alternately hug the circumference of a circular canvas where again, large format squirrels seem to tilt out of the picture plane towards us. A second phrase - “Each one teach one” - screams out from the centre of a large painting in thick red letters like an urgent admonition. The recent work at the McClure confirms Bouthillette’s reputation as a painter with his finger on the pulse of society’s pastiche of anxieties, but one who easily avails himself of any number of artistic strategies and philosophical perspectives that might yet act as wellsprings of meaning. These are intense, provocative works.
Sylvain Bouthillette lives and works in Montreal. He completed his MFA in painting at Concordia University in 1990. His work has been exhibited in Quebec, Ontario, the United States, France and Switzerland. He has participated in over 30 solo and 40 group exhibitions. His prolific artistic practice includes painting, photography, sound installation and music. Bouthillette is the subject of many articles and reviews. His work is in such public collections as the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal and the Musée national des beaux arts du Québec.
Victoria LeBlanc
Director, McClure Gallery
Annual Student Exhibition
: Thursday, April 1 at 6 pm
: April 2 - 21
Students registered in the Visual Arts Centre’s School of Art are invited to exhibit their work. The exhibition includes hundreds of works in a wide variety of media and gives students the experience of seeing their work in the context of a professional gallery. It’s also a chance to appreciate the great diversity of creative activity that takes place at the Centre.
John Fox
Refiguration
: Sandra Paikowsky
: Thursday April 29 at 6 pm
: April 30 to May 22
: Thursday May 6 at 7 pm
This selection of paintings and works on paper by John Fox (1927-2008) signifies his return to representational imagery from the late 1980s to 2007. His evocative people, places and things suggest the incidents of contemporary existence rather than its grand narratives. Fox’s painting is about colour and the intense materiality of colour is a metaphor for his objectifying the enduring emotions of the commonplace.
Max Wyse
: Thursday May 27 at 6 pm
: May 28 to June 19
: Thursday June 3 at 7 pm
Max Wyse’s work is founded on two principal elements: a very personal pictorial language and the creation of layered compositions, foreground to background on plexiglas. His work, which is composed of disparate objects and hybrid beings scattered in unspecified spaces, proposes a certain symbiosis between the human body and the bodies of other animals.
| 
