BF4E
October 10 - November 14, 2015
Nothing, in a painting, calls like true color; it speaks to both the ignorant and the savant.
– Denis Diderot, Essai sur la peinture, 1795
Galerie Trois Points is thrilled to present BF4E, a solo exhibition featuring Mathieu Lévesque’s most recent work. Investing both gallery spaces from October 10 to November 14, the artist will present an installative environment, extending even further his idea of pushing the boundaries of painting.
“The painting and its support are completely intertwined in Lévesque’s work. Many artists before him have played this apodictic inability of the paint to part with any physical medium. Once likened this evidence, they could take one of two paths: either return to the traditional use of the canvas as a support or make it an integral part of the work. Lévesque clearly chose the latter: he uses the possibility of playing with the codes and rules to cross the boundaries of different mediums, or at least to blurry them.
By completely reversing the most basic codes of painting – from skin that circumscribes the body, the frame becomes spine; classical edge that defines what is to be observed becomes the heart of color radiation – the artist corroborates the idea introduced by Patricia Signorile, suggesting that “painting outside of the frame reflects an aesthetic breaking with the idealized contemplation in favour of a greater proximity with the viewer.” The dimensions no longer hold their original intent: the frame becomes the wall while paint thrown against the face of the frame gives it thickness. Furthermore, Lévesque makes all these dimensions inextricable. The illusion of space thus created plays with the modernist all-over idea without necessarily reclaiming itself of classical perspective. Depth is not found in a calculated perspective but rather in the color reflected off the frame, the wall or even the viewer. […]
Everything up to the title of the exhibition is about an incarnation of the artist’s ideas. BF4E – meaning Best Friends Forever – uses both a simulated candor and a certain irony to create a link between the painting and sculpture. The title suggests a kind of eternal friendship amongst the two disciplines but also between the works and the exhibition space’s architecture, more than ever intertwined with the raw forms of BF4E. The exhibition is actually more a question of interdependence between paint and its physicality, between the support to the wall that holds it and the actual structure of the space […].” **
In 2012, Mathieu Lévesque completed his MFA at Université du Québec à Montréal and his work has already been widely displayed in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Chicago, Nashville and Leipzig among others. He has also exhibited at Verticale (Laval, Qc), Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides (St-Jérôme, Qc) and Musée des beaux-arts de Mont St-Hilaire (Qc). He is part of numerous corporate collections including TD Bank, Familiprix, la Peau de l’ours, Sun Life, Conceptis Technologies, Twentieth Century Fox, Les Infidèles along with many private collections.
** Excerpts from the text by Fiona Darbon Van Maercke