Laurence Pilon It Once Was a Garden

Banner Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro

Vernissage: Thursday May 3rd, at 6 pm
Exhibition: May 4 to 26, 2018
Artist’s Talk: Thursday May 10, at 7 pm

Regarding Cézanne’s still life of apples, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “There are 6 apples in the Cézanne picture. What can 6 apples not be. I began to wonder. There’s a relationship to each other, & their colour, & their solidity.” Cézanne’s apples, for Woolf, led her to experience the wonder of matter beyond its representation.

It Once Was a Garden strikes a similar sense of wonder that I suspect Woolf felt when regarding the plump and ever-reddening apples in Cézanne’s still life. Laurence Pilon’s paintings afford us the pleasure that comes with being surprised by what we see. In our visually-dominated world, where seeing is often mistaken for knowing, Pilon’s artworks are generous gifts not to be taken for granted. Pilon denies us this false sense of mastery; her paintings—encrusted, bruised, velvety, patinated—instead declare themselves unknowable. Traces of time and labour are obscured by the process of accumulation. The layers of pigments fossilize to form a surface of muted blues, mauves, pinks, and browns reminiscent of an oyster shell before it has been polished, a cloudy opal, or tarnished silverware: objects weathered by time.

Pilon’s paintings exist in a state of ambiguity. This resistance to categorization makes Pilon’s works particularly difficult to describe; they seem to sit at the edges of meaning. But they are forgiving objects, sympathetic to our desire to unearth and forge memories within the subtle inflections of colours and brushstrokes. Shadows of landscapes and figures lurk within layers of abstraction, giving shape to the way memory brings images in and out of focus and setting our own memory in motion.

It Once Was a Garden suggests a lost utopia. Pilon creates an atmosphere drawn from urban façades, early modern painting, and frescos. This attention to the historicity (the specificity of its time and place) of colour imparts a sense of the longue durée, an accumulated materiality shaped by collective experience. Pilon’s paintings capture the density of time. As we watch, they grow heavier. I began to wonder.

Text by Sara Nicole England.

LAURENCE PILON lives and works in Montreal. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University, which she received in 2015 with great distinction. Her paintings have been exhibited in Montreal and in the United States.