Artists
Maude Corriveau
Erik Nieminen
Maude Corriveau
Maude Corriveau addresses know-how issues through a practice of hyperdrawing that she applies both on paper and in space. She works with dry pastels to create compositions akin to still lives that question the very nature of representation. She uses codes dear to the art history, such as draperies and their textures or fragments of architecture. Experience is the driving force behind her process, which explores the effects of light on matter to generate optical phenomena (shadows, reflections, diffractions), which she photographs, and then modifies and draws. The possibility of altering these digitally allows her to exacerbate certain effects and transform the pictorial space into an ethereal world. By exploring the installation mode with in situ strategies, Corriveau attempts to reproduce, in the exhibition space, studio experiences in order to put the viewer in a contemplative yet active position.
Maude Corriveau grew up between West Africa and the South Shore of Montreal. She lives and works in Montreal and teaches visual arts at the college level. She holds a Master's degree (2020) and a Bachelor's degree (2009) in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is the recipient of the Canada Council's Explore and Create grant (2021) and the prestigious J. Armand Bombardier Foundation Graduate Fellowship (2019). Her work has been shown in Canada and the United States, among others, at the Future Fair 2022 in New York, the Quebec City Art Fair (2022), Art Toronto (2020-21), Papier (2020-21), and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Vendu-Sold 2018). His works are part of the Desjardins collection, the collection of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), and numerous private collections. Maude Corriveau is represented by Galerie Nicolas Robert.
Erik Nieminen
Erik Nieminen seeks to dismantle the reality that we inhabit in order to remake reality according the logic inherent in the painting process. With that in mind his works cannot be easily categorized, as elements from many genres combine into one. He is mainly interested in the dissolution of space, perspective, light, and time through varying degrees of figuration where form is created through a responsive and adaptive process over a length of time. Colours and shapes are reworked until an ideal solution is found.
Erik Nieminen is Finnish-Canadian artist born in 1985. He achieved a BFA from the University of Ottawa and an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal. He has exhibited in both Europe and North America, including recent solo shows in London, Montreal, New York City, and Berlin.Present in both private and corporate collections, he is the recipient of numerous awards, including three Elizabeth Greenshields Grants, the Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Council for the Arts, and the Grand Prize Winner for the final edition of the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series. He lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.
Spéculaires :
For the Spéculaires exhibition, Erik Nieminen and Maude Corriveau have produced drawings and paintings in which space is deployed in an array of imbricated refractions and luminous transparencies. Consequently, these patterns of concealment and unveilings reflect the aesthetic and spatial characteristics of the gallery, a bright and prism-like space, which becomes an extension of their works (and vice versa).
In Maude Corriveau's work, submissive modernity brings us its own head on a silver platter.
Those drapes, mirrors, and plants might be vestiges of the presence of Salome, who is furtive yet jealous of appearances. This skillful seductress, at once gentle and violent, draws the eye to the blind spots generated by repeated and shifting cropping. The imminent incarnation of the ghost cannot be witnessed directly, but expectation projects our desire beyond the frame.
In the work of Erik Nieminen, the image occurs by sedimentation. Nevertheless, there is a solid underlying structure to the mirage. The moments that settle on the canvas are extracted from an indefinite, cyclical, and cosmic duration, following processes that organize the field around the viewer's corporeality as it integrates it into the painted field. Nieminen reconciles us with this presence that the founders of perspective, steeped in Neoplatonism, invoked alchemically.
These bodies, that Corriveau's work evokes as a survivor of an unfinished modern project and that Nieminen's work conceives as an aggregator of a holistic, almost medieval conception of the universe, release possibilities that have been caught in the opaque density of time, just as a diamond extracts the purest light from the most compact and obscurest of matter.
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