Shireen Kamran Soul Matters
Exhibition: February 7th to March 1st, 2014
Vernissage: Thursday February 6th at 6 pm
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Soul Matters, an exhibition of recent works by Shireen Kamran. The approximately 12 paintings included in the exhibition testify to the artist’s continuing exploration of the intersections and tensions between the representational and abstract. Her recent works evince an emboldened, expressive energy and painterly experimentation.
Kamran’s paintings lay out a deeply personal iconography of marks against an atmospheric ground. The artist notes, “My work is autobiographical to some extent, a visual language engaged in a search for self, drawing on cultural traditions perceived to be forbidden.” Much of the emotional energy of Kamran’s painting emerges from the recurring negotiation and reconciliation of her roots. Kamran’s work is steeped in Sufi mysticism and the lyric poetry of Rumi. Her works thus function as diasporic topographies. Paintings such as The Way of the Soul #3 or Cul de Sac, are long horizontals that suggest an unfolding narrative of cultural reminiscence, dislocation, retrieval, and at times, resolution. We move alternately through quiet tempered spaces of dark indigo or nuanced gray before confronting dense vertical passages of gesture, shape and colour. Scattered strategically throughout the field is the artist’s private lexicon – hybrid animal and human shapes, a vessel, frayed letters, a tear, a chair, a shoreline. The roughly rendered metaphors remain ambiguous, teasingly just below the threshold of recognition, their meaning deriving as much from what is withheld, and the gestural energy of that withholding, as from the image itself. The palette is recognizable; rich burnt yellows and cadmium reds against harmonic grays and browns. Her brushstrokes, scrapings, and layering of paint imbue the canvas with a raw physicality that recalls the sensibility of early German Expressionism. Shireen Kamran’s works are nuanced archaeologies of shifting moods, enigmatic marks and celebratory gestures that move far beyond the personal in their quest for equilibrium.
Michel Daigneault Some Reflections on the Naked Mountain
Exhibition: March 7 to 29, 2014
Vernissage: Vernissage: Thursday March 6 at 6 pm
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the most recent paintings of Michel Daigneault in Some Reflections on the Naked Mountain, an exhibition which brings together a dozen of the artist’s most recent large format canvases.
In Some Reflections on the Naked Mountain, Daigneault intensifies his orchestration of a transitory space to further undermine the border between the two great categories of painting – figuration and abstraction. In these new works, the painter incites the viewer to rethink what is being seen by creating a pictorial space where the vocabulary of abstraction depicts a recognizable reality. His painterly strategies allow him to play with and juggle certain visual analogies. The mountain, as the title of the exhibition indicates, functions here as an allusion. Latent, imprecise, it appears in the painting in different forms – be it a contour line, an accumulation of shapes, or yet again, the architecture of landscape in its own right.
Michel Daigneault is among a new generation of abstract painters born “after abstraction.” While it is often thought that little remains to be said within the abstract genre, Daigneault’s canvases bear witness to a reconsideration and renewal of abstraction’s pictorial language. Though non-figurative, his works play ceaselessly with the idea of figuration – through colour, form and their arrangement in space. He takes pleasure in using simple shapes and rich colours to create an intrigue that evokes, rather than reveals, the narrative potential of his works. Indeed, as Gaston Saint-Pierre has noted: “The painting of Michel Daigneault is guided by a regiment of intervention, accountability, mutability of systems and declension of images. We are not in the domain of illusion but rather that of allusion.”
Annual Student Exhibition
Vernissage: Thursday, April 4 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 5 to April 20
Students registered in the School of Art’s winter session are invited to exhibit their work in our Annual Student Exhibition. The exhibition, which includes hundreds of works in a wide variety of media, gives students the experience of seeing their work in the context of a professional gallery. It also provides an opportunity for students and public to see the great diversity of creative activity that takes place at the Centre.
Pirates de l’art
Vernissage: Thursday May 1st at 6 pm
Exhibition: May 2 to 24
Invited Curator: Robert Poulin
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Pirates de l’art, an exhibition curated by Robert Poulin that brings together the unique works of artists whose practices thrive away from the norm.
It is outside the corridors of institutional and academic art that collector Robert Poulin has, for over a decade now, been navigating his ship. It is there – at the margins of the ‘high’ art world – that he discovers, « les pirates» far from the world of concepts, art statements and written texts. The exhibition Pirates de l’art presents approximately 20 artists who defy easy classification. Their works are marked with a spirit of unrestrained subversion and jubilant invention. Opposed to the world of the savant, these lovers of drawing nourish themselves on the raw stuff of popular culture. Resisting the accepted and dominant attitudes of our time, they privilege instinct over intellect.
Welcome to the rebellious world of Claude Bolduc, Romulo Cesar, Daniel Erban, Marc Leduc, Jacinthe Loranger, Kim Moodie, Shaun Morin, Nancy Ogilvie, Osvaldo Ramirez-Castillo, Étienne Rochon, John Todd , Henriette Valium, Max Wyse and their consorts. With their hands they recount their stories. With our eyes, we hear them.
From 1972 to 1992, Robert Poulin was a professional sculptor working on tubular pieces. He founded la Peau de l’Ours in 1995, a buyers’ collective that now regroups nearly seventy large format artworks. A renowned collector, Poulin has organized many exhibitions and has collaborated with the Galerie d’art d’Outremont. He has opened his own galerie, l’Espace Robert Poulin, which sits in the Belgo building since 2012. L’Espace Robert Poulin has since participated in many important art fairs such as TIAF and PAPIER.
Suzelle Levasseur Pyro
Vernissage: Thursday May 29 at 6 pm
Exhibition: May 30 to June 21, 2014
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the work of Suzelle Levasseur in the exhibition PYRO. Featured are several large canvases as well as a series of small drawings on paper. The work is autobiographical : using fluid acrylics the artist works intuitively and gesturally to explore memories, both visual and sensory.
Accompanied by explosive sounds, the fireworks would emerge from the smithy where Levasseur’s father practiced his craft: a small cube where rivers of fire and incandescent forms entwined in bursts of light. This father-forger, this Hephaistos, who captured the curiosity of Levasseur as a child, continues to haunt her memory. In this new ensemble of works, she searches for the imprint of the forge fire, as auditory as it is visual. With PYRO, Suzelle Levasseur moves beyond her father’s studio to immerse herself physically as a painter in shards of light, colour, and anarchic explosive traces. In blowing on the embers of the mneumonic, Levasseur seeks to establish the contrasts and harmonies that correspond to the visual impression of electric fire.
Even before proceeding with the painting, an interior journey commences to connect with a precise energy, drive and breath. Finally, a mark appears. «It is there, in that space, in that precise moment that the painting begins, » notes the artist. « The gesture is ready, the paints are mixed, everything falls into place. » For Levasseur, the process is instinctive and corporeal. The works that emerge are at one and the same time intimate and dazzling, and, for the artist, resonant with sensorial memory.
