Hello to Paradise
January 14 - February 11, 2006
To open the 2006 program, the gallery is pleased to present for the first time in Montreal a young Vancouver artist, George Vergette. This exhibition entitled “Hello to Paradise” brings together paintings of different formats as well as some works on paper. This striking production offers a reflection whose foundations are based on the quest for happiness in everyday life.
The paintings are composed of layers of resin that stagger the pictorial masses creating an impressive depth. In contrast to the reflective and seductive surface of the painting, the drippings and incriptions she lets discover evoke urban graffiti. The nervous gestures of these graphs almost erased by various pictorial strategies tends to abstract the text that is grafted there. It recognizes the general form of the letters, but their order has been moved. Initiated ideas that are partially formed leave the viewer looking for the meaning. The observation required for deciphering is enough to plunge the visitor into the picture and engulf him in his personal intimacy and memories. Meditative and melancholy blues, the artist projects us in violent and poignant reds while our eyes seem to slide on evasive whites.
Intrigued by the small fatalities imposed on us by life, the artist presents us with a body of work that combines victory with defeat. In this context, where they generally refer to the notion of paradise, the titles paradoxically engage a profoundly dramatic sensitivity where the grandiose rubs shoulders with the tragic. They provoke often contradictory states of mind generated by word associations such as “the beauty of failure” or “the last victory”. The result is a material and psychological depth that can only absorb the viewer.