Jennifer Hornyak The Figure Revisited
Exhibition: May 1 to 23, 2015
Vernissage: Thursday, April 30 at 6 pm
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, May 7 at 7 pm
The McClure Gallery is pleased to feature a new body of figurative work by Jennifer Hornyak in the exhibition, The Figure Revisited. Approximately 30 oil paintings completed between 2014 and 2015 are included. The canvases depict the human form alone or in groups and a series of smaller portraits that resonate with a dark poetics all their own. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, with text by gallery director Victoria LeBlanc.
Over the last two decades Jennifer Hornyak’s focus has been, almost exclusively, an expressive exploration of the still life genre. We immediately recognize the signature mark making, rich colour harmonies, a raw and passionate painterliness that distills, in ever-recombinant forms, the lyrical and fleeting quality of her subject. The figurative works in this exhibition represent not so much a new foray as a circling back, a retrieval of a theme she explored earlier, throughout the 80s. The recent paintings reveal the artist in her prime, wielding paint and vision towards unsettling truths about the human condition but, more precisely and more personally, towards the definition of a self-realized through the act of painting and the material of paint itself.
Hornyak speaks of wanting to capture a certain “pathos and frailty which exists in the human condition.” Indeed, the works speak of a profound sense of human solitude, as figures wander through parks and public spaces, disconnected witnesses isolated by their interiority. In the small portraits Hornyak renders isolated faces against monochromatic backgrounds in thick viscous layers of paint. Indeed, the profound emotional impact of the works emerge from the fertile meeting of conflicting impulses: the painterly desire to let paint itself convey meaning – Hornyak strives for increasing abstraction in her work – and the refusal to abandon the burden of the image – the human form. The artist successfully creates a liminal space between figuration and abstraction where poetic meaning and optic pleasure resonate.
The Figure Revisited
– Jennifer Hornyak
54 pages (37 color reproductions)
french / english
ISBN : 978-192649203-2
McClure Gallery, 2015
available: Amazon.ca
24,95 $ + tx
