Nathan Walsh

Johannie Lemire

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Spéculaires II

As you might have guessed, the title echoes the exhibition Spéculaires (16.06.22 - 17.07.22) by Erik Nieminen and Maude Corriveau. These artists had presented us with “a body of drawings and paintings in which space is broken down into overlapping layers of refractive and luminous transparencies”. The very same terms apply to the albeit distinctive works of Nathan Walsh and Johannie Lemire.

Nathan's work is rooted in a single and objective point of view. However, his creative use of perspective allows him to peel back the transparent planes of the visible to introduce a subjective temporality. As a result, time blossoms within the moment. The drawings he presents here are integral registers of the détournement process, summing up the deconstructive and reconstructive act on which the work is based. 

Johannie Lemire's agile brushwork methodically mines opaque matter to extract a luminous order. Her patient labor cancels the space between subject and object, superimposing the microstructures and macrostructures of the visible. Johannie's painted universe is a kaleidoscopic synthesis, simultaneously evoking the macular structure of the eye and the cosmos captured by it. 
 

Transparency and reflection play a central role in the conception of these paintings and drawings designed to defuse the binary conceptions that separate us from the world. The last thing in our mind then, is the idea of making these concepts fulcrums around which we can articulate an ontology of the specificity of figurative painting: that would spoil it entirely.