La part manquante
This painting holds up!
It's easy to imagine the demeanour of someone who utters these words in front of a work of art. Arms crossed, body weight resting on a receding leg, head tilted slightly backwards. With these few words, he aligns all the object's dimensions - form, content and message - with a certitude that, in his view, puts the matter to rest.
And indeed, David Gagnon's paintings do hold up, but by holding themselves up, they hold up little else. They are a kind of porte-à-faux, a metaphysics of frugality, openings unto a theatre of penumbra where an intimate, almost mystical scene that evokes childhood games is played out.
When, amidst the rubble of an in-progress scenography, we discover a gaze that returns to our own, we sense that these eyes observing us are not complicit. They seem to say: “What need do we have of you?” “None of this is of your concern!”
In the end, when all the initial certainties have finally melted away, nothing will be left of our epigraph's presumptuous tone. Or is it really just the beginning?