Matthieu Bouchard, Ludovic Cléroux, Allison Katz and Bea Parsons | Light Falls on Things: the Metaphysics of Painting

Exhibition: October 2 to 24, 2015
Vernissage: Thursday, October 1st at 6 pm
Curator’s Talk: Thursday, October 8th at 7 pm

Light Falls on Things: the Metaphysics of Painting is curated by well-known artist David Elliott. It presents a rousing exhibition of the work of four artists – Matthieu Bouchard, Ludovic Cléroux, Allison Katz and Bea Parsons – all of whom remind us that, in Elliott’s view, “metaphysical painting is alive and well in the 21st century.”

David Elliott’s curatorial direction is informed by a longstanding fascination with the metaphysical in art. Far from limiting the term to the work of De Chirico, he sees it cutting a swath through the entire history of western art, from the late Gothic painters to Philip Guston. “Maybe the best way to describe the metaphysical in painting is as a place where certainty and mystery are locked in an intense and sublime embrace. It is exactly in this place that these four artists practice their art, re-affirming painting as the great speculative medium.” While working in very different styles, they are linked by their rejection of the “big in-your-face statement,” opting instead for a more delicate balance between the ordinary and the extraordinary, able to delve into the “most minor thing, a trifle” to open it up in revealing ways.
Elliott writes evocatively and with passion about each of the artists selected for the exhibition. Matthieu Bouchard’s work carries an air of “forensics” with the use of skulls, corpses and crime scenes as he moves between his own version of magic realism and process-based abstraction. “All his paintings are imbued with light, at times beautiful, at times unsettling, but always affecting. . . There is always the sense of something lurking just underneath the surface or just beyond reach.” Ludovic Cléroux’s images of solitary rooms capture a sense of ever shifting light and the passage of time. “An overhead projector abandoned in favor of the rigor of direct observation, sits personified on a stool like one of De Chirico’s mannequin philosophers or all-knowing eyes. . . creating spaces of great profundity, reservoirs for intense perception, thought and measure.” Of Allison Katz, Elliot notes, “Chameleon-like, her paintings and exhibitions can take on a variety of casts, from the concise integrity of a bouquet of store-bought flowers on a wooden shelf to the pandemonium of nudes and monkeys swimming on a gessoed ground. . . Allison has the remarkable ability to get inside one’s head, as though she has tapped into our dreams, our fantasies, the peculiarities and peccadilloes that drive us and make us human. “Elliott describes Bea Parson’s paintings as oracles, “mesmerizing with their inner glow. . . The swirling brushwork possesses the qualities of the natural forces of wind and water, eroding one form to create another. There is a lively dialogue between abstraction and representation, as the recognition of imagery comes and goes, a flower, a vase, the face of the moon, most startlingly a chicken’s foot.”

For anyone interested in painting’s sustaining power, this is an exhibition that underlines just that, presenting four young artists whose work continues to provoke and exult.