Puzzle

It is with great pleasure that Galerie Trois Points presents Puzzle, the MFA thesis exhibition of artist Mathieu Lévesque, taking place from November 17th to December 15th 2012.

Mathieu Lévesque approaches the painting as an object, both concrete and material, of which he enjoys disrupting the traditional stages of development and basic components in order to reveal its physical dimensions and traces of studio work as well as the way in which the piece takes place in space, trying to update the definition of what is a painting.

The strong impastos are probably the most common strategy to deal with the materiality of paint and pushing back the limits of the painting by bringing it closer to sculpture. Having experimented with this approach at a certain period, Lévesque has chosen here to invest the canvas edges by making interventions in the parts that are often abandoned, which gives them characteristics peculiar to sculpture. Therefore, he reverses the usual roles of the front and the edges of the canvas, the first being generally the part that receives the painting material. Hence, he distorts the traditional function of the edge’s delimitation, as it becomes a liaison.

Lévesque is fascinated by the boundary areas between painting, sculptural and architectural disciplines, which have led him to want to push the boundaries of painting while reducing as much as possible the possibilities to enter the painting. This approach has consequently led him to use the in situ intervention as a mean to address the dependence of painting towards architecture. Therefore, Mathieu Lévesque wonders what happens – or could happen – outside those boundaries, and the kind of expansion that painting can take in the space. With his negative canvas cut up from the gallery’s architecture, and again with his installation of the piece Puzzle, his research redefines the painting, either by subtraction of the material or by its expansion in the space.

Mathieu Lévesque is completing his MFA at Université du Québec à Montréal with this exhibition. He has recently collected several distinctions, notably the bourses Jean-Marc Eustache et FARE awarded by UQAM. 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-Saint-Hilaire 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). He is part of numerous corporate collections including Familiprix, la Peau de l’ours, Sun Life, Conceptis Technologies, Twentieth Century Fox and Les Infidèles.

Press release