Cécile Ronc Le pays où l’on n’arrive jamais
Exhibition: Septembre 5 to 27 2014
Vernissage: Thursday September 4 at 6 pm
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the work of Cecile Ronc in the exhibition Le pays où l’on n’arrive jamais. With these large format oil paintings, the artist realizes the kind of pictorial space she has been searching for: a landscape marked by diverse impressions and reminiscences of places both lived and dreamed.
The recent direction of Ronc’s work emerged out of an attempt to make visible her memories of Iceland’s lunar landscapes, seen on a recent visit to that country. « In this ‘palimpsest’ country », she notes, « the history of the land is naked, its’ wrinkles evident; the traces of erosion, of irrigation as well as the continually changing patterns of hollows and forms are like the veins and breath that nourish the human body. » The influence of this unique and strange landscape led Ronc to engage with a more fluid manner of painting, allowing the paint to flow naturally, leaving room for the play of accident. This approach came closer to satisfying her desire to mirror, in the very process of painting, the way nature itself creates.
Le pays où l’on n’arrive jamais is the country that resists the determined quest of the characters in a novel by André Dhôtel and which they never reach. It is the country of memories, dreams, lived experiences, ideas accumulated from a thousand places. It is the country of childhood, of our first gaze upon the world. It is a view that does not seek to explain itself but rather is content to see things as they are. It is also the Promised Land whose sole purpose is to provide something to lean towards. Ronc’s process – her slow, patient, painterly explorations in one stready direction – in a sense resembles the characters’ search for the country that is never attained. Arrival eludes her, stretching further ahead as she strives towards it. The artist writes, “It is through such meandering twists, turns and quicksands that I come to stop, by chance, on occasion, to admire the view and finally see that which surrounds me.” The exhibition at the McClure Gallery represents a halt, a moment of repose in the inexhaustible quest for the country that can never be reached.