Karine Fréchette Astérisme

Vernissage: Thursday October 5, at 6 pm
Exhibition: October 6 to 28, 2017
Artist Talk: Thursday October 12, at 7 pm

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the recent work of Karine Fréchette. Her exhibition Astérismes explores the phenomenon of natural and artificial light in painting, and thereby indirectly considers an increasingly complex and distorted relationship between space and time. This body of work is fed by a fascination with all sorts of transmitted waves, be they of astral or telecommunication origin. She evokes a flux of oscillations, as if the canvas becomes a receptacle, where undefined currents are mobilized or become the anchor point of an expanding network. The immaterial is materialized through a dozen medium and large format canvases.

Various procedures, such as repetition, modulation, the accumulation of linear motifs, and the echoes of digital or analog representations, serve as matrices of a genuine subject: irregularity. This provokes different illusions and disorientations of optical and spatial perception. A space-time experience that is possible, but unclear.

Karine Fréchette investigates the relationship between colour, light, space, and movement. Her practice is resolutely Neo Baroque, and is close to Op Art and early 20th century abstraction. She searches constantly for ways to activate the space between the canvas and the spectator. Like an asterism, she attempts to create formal relationships, to trace the lines between impromptu ideas, and to uncover analogies.

KARINE FRÉCHETTE lives and works in Montreal. She completed her MFA at Concordia University at the end of 2016 after obtaining a BFA in Visual and Media arts at UQAM (2009). During her studies, she received the Hélène Couture Award, and was a finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition (2014). Her work has been shown at Galerie B-312, Art-Mûr Gallery, Stewart Hall Gallery, and at the Gatineau Cultural Centre. This year, after her first artist residency at Banff Center (Alberta), she represented up and coming painters at the Jeux de la Francophonie in Côte d’Ivoire.