Goûts d’éclats
February 17 - March 17, 2011
We are thrilled to present young painter Mathieu Lévesque’s solo exhibition Goût d’éclats from February 17th to March 19th. The artist has previously shown his work at the gallery in a duo exhibition with Scott Everingham entitled Nouvelles couleurs |New colors, in 2010.
Lévesque’s most recent work witnesses a rich and singular aesthetic touch. He is deeply invested in the material, in accumulation and in forms, which he exploits to the very edge of the surface. His shaped canvases remind us of Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly’s as it witnesses a genuine investment in the questioning of the media. Lévesque’s work is a product of his time; he plays with the juxtaposition of languages by combining oil, acrylic, found objects and stickers. He accumulates and tangles various stylistic and aesthetic strategies to create unique works of art that embody the idea of ultracommunication which is so central to our era.
This notion is omnipresent in Lévesque’s artistic practice as he focuses on the action of applying material on the surface as the elementary process in painting. By creating works that are characterized by their excessive materiality and iconographical plurality, Lévesque communicates a sense of overavailability of pictorial references. Through his reflexion on notions of accumulation and excess, he creates canvas-objects that are saturated with information and trigger a sense of over-productivity that is so typical of today’s contemporary society.
Mathieu Lévesque is currently finishing his Master’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM where he completed a BFA in 2001. His work has been widely displayed in Montreal (Galerie Push, Galerie Trois Points), as well as in Laval at Galerie Verticale, at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, Musée des beaux-arts de Mont-SaintHilaire for the drawing Biennale in 2008, as well as in the exhibition Fait à Montréal Made in 2006, curated by Marc Séguin. His work has also been displayed in the United States, notably in Chicago (IL), Nashville (TN) and at the Hunter Museum of American Art (Chattanooga, TN).