Artistes
David Gagnon Dexter Barker Glenn Trevor Bourke Philippe Denis
From One Dimension to Another More than ever, we know the territory won by human consciousness is borrowed territory. However, it is impossible not to invest oneself in this minefield between the self and its other, between man and nature. It is therefore fair to say of this domain that it is apprehended, both because it must be grasped, and inseparably, because it is to be feared. Now if the task of painting reflects that of a metaphysics which perpetually rethinks, without reifying it, the relation between subject and object, let us therefore make this generalization about contemporary painting: no matter how the artist articulates the prism of the subjective, it will reflect a circumspect attitude in the face of a representation claims transparency. This explains the extreme diversity of approaches. The artists in this exhibition, David Gagnon, Dexter Barker Glenn, Trevor Bourke and Philippe Denis, also seek to lighten the burden of this Sisyphean enterprise, through an emboldened recourse to staging, fiction, framing, that is to say by doubling up the terms of the representation rather than by criticizing it. ECB
David Gagnon
David Gagnon lives and works in Montreal and Val-David. He graduated from UQAM in visual and media arts. He has exhibited his works in several Maisons de la Cultures in Montreal, at the Maison de Arts de Laval and at the Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides. In 2012, he sojourned in Basel as part of one of the CALQ artist residencies. Painting and reading create a spatiotemporal spaces that are usually specific to them. In the works of David Gagnon they seem to merge. Cover, leaf, page, spine, dust jacket, back cover, front cover, fore edge, book block, head cap, gutter, footer, i.e. the body of the book, or frame, stretcher, panel, canvas, mat, brace, glaze, impasto, all of this combines in an impossible topography, patiently and methodically put together of worlds pregnant with other worlds.
Dexter Barker Glenn
Dexter Barker-Glenn is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Montreal and Toronto. He is currently completing a bachelor's degree in Studio Arts with a minor in computer science at Concordia University.. By adjoining "prostheses" to his paintings, apparent absurd materialization of an ergonomic gaze, Dexter Barker Glenn emphasizes the limits of the frame. If these rudimentary objects - wooden sticks, racks, pulleys, furniture fragments, ropes and other residues of excess - seem to be there to rehabilitate our disillusioned gaze, it is perhaps a sign that the horizons of the image remain stubbornly disappointing. in a era virtuose in virtual obsessions. Perhaps, on the contrary, they are there to help revive the memory of a time when we knew of unencumbered ways to take aim at the universe : childhood.
Trevor Bourke
Trevor Bourke lives and works in Montreal. He completed a bachelors in studio arts in Concordia 2020 and has participated in group shows in Canada (at Project Casa and Circa, among others) and In the united States.
Trevor Bourke's paintings summon a fairground universe that should not be so disquieting at a time when the spectacularization of media has completely tamed carnavalesque imaginary. And yet, they are disturbing, no doubt because they disturb familiar stylistic and iconographic coordinates.
By making these his scapegoats, the artist attacks the safeguards that preserve current discourse on painting from its own excesses. Their effectiveness in this regard seems to be verified in the observation that his works destabilize the specialist more than it does the amateur.