Friday, December 18, 2009

Dominique que Fortin

Dominique's work is centered towards human characters. Her painting, sometimes naive, sometimes more abstract, is a sort of study of the human soul in a contemporary style, but full of the emotions of romanticism. It once depicted reality, but today, it has something of the exoticism of fairy-like dreams, where the characters are actors but also the catalysts of emotion.

Modern Art with its sensuality, its use of lines, movement and ornamentation was of great influence in her first years' pictural vision. But since the beginning, continuously exploring new horizons, Dominique has tried to free herself of her influences, using everything that she can grab to embellish her paintings with bursts of color, textures and media, making her way to find her own symbolic language.


Techniques mixtes sur bois,120cm x 150cm(disponible à la Galerie Saint-Dizier)



Today, her vision is centered towards childhood, this paradise lost for adulthood that she idealizes because she's constantly brought back to it by her own children, as she paints their unfailing joy of life, candor and imagination.


Pamela Dodds

Pamela Dodds known as printmaker also a large-scale painter, typically using vibrant colors and a bold palette. Her subject matter has been concerned with the figure, but also with the idea of narrative. Each painting features figures frozen in a moment of interaction – an interaction that has no precedent, and no discernible conclusion, as the viewer has no access to the story the painting told.



Dodds exploits the grain of her woodblocks as an important collaborator; the surface of the wood itself plays an active compositional role in this suite of prints. Having carefully selected and marked out each plank of wood so that it featured a particularly symmetrical pattern, from the inception, these works emphasize the idea of the mirror both aesthetically and conceptually.

Martin Beaupre

Adventurous, his many travels in Asia have had an undeniable influence on his artistic career, reflected in the duality of the yin and the yang often expressed in his work. Back from a trip to Japan, Martin Beaupre is always evolving and is guided by a particular interaction of art and energy that nourishes his world. His philosophy, emitting beauty and harmony, in spite of emanate from his works. The artist’s perception of the world that surrounds him results in work that inspires tranquility and gentleness, while evoking an insatiable interest in oriental culture.



His painting, whether figurative or abstract, reflects the serenity and the calm of his meditative states. His works, with their clean lines in which white predominates, initiates the spectator to looking at a work by confronting one’s own interior world.

Candice Breitz

Inner + Outer Space

Candice Breitz investigates contemporary media culture using the language of the entertainment industry, including pop music, television and Hollywood films. Stradding the sometimes ambiguous terrain between art, entertainment and consumerism, she edits, re-contextualizes or otherwise re-interprets familiar elements of our mediated mass culture landscape to produce aesthetically dazzling and critically engaging multi-channel video installations. In addition to being technically accomplished and conceptually rich, Breitz’s works engage wide range of participants and audiences from diverse backgrounds thanks to their committed engagement with the codes of popular culture.

ueen (A Portrait of Madonna), 2005/2006


Same Game, 2009

Matthew Sweig

Matthew Sweig is not only a prodigiously gifted painter but also a landscape architect – one will be amazed by his astonishing representational ability. He can make black and white paintings that look remarkably like black and white photographs, with much stronger texture.

His show Arable land at XEXE gallery in Toronto:

Arable land is an agricultural term used to describe land that can be used for growing crops. Agriculture is the key development in human history that enabled humans to develop and maintain complex societies. Agricultural production has provided a reliable, predictable food source and out of this abundance, human civilization has grown.



Today agriculture has been pushed further and further from our everyday experience. The means of producing food is disconnected from urban populations, both geographically and psychologically. The very cities that agriculture has made possible now sprawl over the earth that once fed them. Still, the romanticized notion of the farmer mindfully tending crops from seeds in the spring into a plentiful harvest in the fall still lingers in the corners of our memories.







The exhibited works show seemingly mundane views of agricultural landscapes. These symbolic images of the agricultural landscape of the past are ingrained in our collective unconscious. The memory of ‘the farm’ that we all drove by on the highway while growing up serves as a benchmark from which we might evaluate the present.

Pierre Durette

Pierre Durette’s paintings are the result of ongoing research, both historical and art historical. With an interest in Bruegel the Elder, Byzantine art and stories of conquest and war, his works, have a catastrophic element to them: the canvas or blank paper take on the role of an unknown place under siege. White backgrounds create an empty pictorial space allowing the artist to focus on the narrative of his characters.



“Between the grotesque detail and the poetry of the ages, and where these two meet, I present a revision of linear time in a rigorous mix of centuries, cultures, and traditions.” Durette’s canvases incorporate faraway, aerial view and a conscious staging of characters, with meticulous attention to detail. Pierre Durette lives and works in Montreal, where he completed a BFA at the University of Quebec at Montreal.