Daniel Langevin Vacuités

Banner Photo: Guy L’Heureux

Vernissage: Thursday January 4, at 6 pm
Exhibition: January 5 to 27, 2017

The McClure Gallery is pleased to begins 2018 with the recent work of painter Daniel Langevin. His exhibition Vacuités presents work of diverse formats, sometime in series or amas (clumped together). Sylvain Lafleur, part-time faculty in communication studies and independent researcher, says: ‘’Over the course of many years and exhibitions, Daniel Langevin’s work has featured clean compositions highlighted by precise, flat areas of colour. For him, it is possible to carry forward the work of his predecessors (those who worked during the prime of formalist painting) by exploiting the possibilities of shapes and motifs not solely limited to geometry. Beginning with images of everyday objects, he extracts abstract polychromatic forms that create optical effects. More specifically, he reduces these objects to motifs to create unusual forms and to erase their original references. In the spirit of Hard Edge painting, Langevin reproduces the shapes with care upon the smooth surface of the support, creating paintings that provoke lingering effects upon the eye through the meeting of contrasting colours and the subtle exploitation of tonal variations.

In his exhibition at the McClure Gallery, Vacuités, Daniel Langevin continues to work with the formal rearrangement of everyday objects. He also reflects upon the overabundance of images made available by powerful search engines (such as Google Images), which allow one to see a large quantity of similar visual elements, densely grouped into a scrolling optical space (a web page). Vacuités refers to the visual layout of image collection programs and presents a series of paintings that underscore the incongruities created by mosaics of images displayed as thumbnails, including the stretching, squishing, poor image resolution, reframing, and cropping that online images are subjected to. The series of paintings entitled Lot, Amas, Attirail, responds to the devaluation of images that have been stripped of their specificity, and the trivialization of images that are viewed repeatedly.’’

DANIEL LANGEVIN lives and works in Montréal. His work have been shown at Centre Clark, B-312 and Parisian Laundry, as well as at the gallery that represents him, Galerie René Blouin. He obtained research and creation grants from Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and Canada Council for the Arts and also realised various public art commissions, notably at the Westmount Recreation Centre. His work is part of numerous private and public collections in Canada and United States.

Vacuités – Daniel Langevin

6 pages (7 colour reproductions)
English / French
ISBN : 978-1-926492-16-2
Galerie McClure, 2018
Available: McClure Gallery
$6