Dan Brault Mixed Tape [Side A: Frankenstein / Side B: Hard smoke]
Vernissage:Thursday, September 17 at 6 pm
Exhibition: September 11 to October 3, 2009
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, September 17 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery opens its fall season with the exhibition Mixed Tape [Side A: Frankenstein / Side B: Hard smoke] featuring the paintings of Dan Brault. The artist brings together images from diverse aesthetic sources. By borrowing from classical genres such as gestural abstraction or the still life, Brault creates works of varying styles and techniques, from hard-edge painting to cartooning.
Brault confronts images; his approach resembles that of a DJ who draws from existing sources and personal imagery to create new representations. The McClure exhibition also reflects the artist’s preoccupation with how his work occupies a site-specific space. The small gallery [Side A: Frankenstein] presents a painterly collage of diverse styles interacting within a single picture plane. In the large gallery [Side B: Hard smoke] the sense of confrontation is less obvious, emerging more from the contrast between a strict geometric format and its seemingly incongruous content – blurred, evanescent, out of focus. The two gallery spaces themselves play off against each other further enriching the artist’s innovative “mixed tape” of aesthetic discourse.
In breaking traditional boundaries, Dan Brault plays with our capacity to classify genres and questions even the notion of artistic styles or movements. His hybrid associations push against the viewer’s own historical knowledge or understanding of what is and isn’t art.
Born in Montreal, Dan Brault lives and works in Quebec City. He received a BFA from Concordia University (2002) and a MFA Laval University (2006). His work has been shown in different gallery and artist run center across Quebec and Canada. He recently participate in the 26th edition of the Symposium international d’art de Baie Saint-Paul. Soon, we will see his work at the Centre Art-Image (Gatineau). He his represented by the Peak Gallery of Toronto.