Communiqué : RICHARD CLOUTIER | STÉPHANIE L’HEUREUX
Exhibition from August 27 to September 26, 2015
Opening on August 26 from 5 pm to 8 pm
Galerie Bernard presents, from August 27 to September 26, an exhibition bringing together the works of Richard Cloutier and Stéphanie L’Heureux.
The exhibition makes us discover the works of Richard Cloutier and Stéphanie L’Heureux, two artists with different practices that seemed appropriate to present together. The choice to initiate the coexistence of the works of these two artists in the same space seemed, from the start, as a no-brainer.
Richard Cloutier practices a painting inspired by architecture and the plan, through which he expresses a genuine spontaneity and great poetry. Stéphanie L’Heureux, for her part, makes us rediscover the pleasure of the gesture, thus reviving the expressive and emotional painting ability.
Richard Cloutier revisits geometric abstraction in painting, through the prism of his architect experience. Drawing from codes and graphic processes used in this discipline, he applies to divert these techniques that serve here no set construction, but become organizational guidelines for the application of material. Thus, these structures seem to float in a space where the accumulated layers reflect stages of their realization. At the crossroads between architecture and painting, his paintings become the meeting place of the line and color, figure and background. Inspired by the city of Culture of Galicia by architect Peter Eisenman, Richard Cloutier presents a series of canvases that evoke a certain duality between the rigor of the trace and the expressive flexibility of the color.
Stéphanie L’Heureux, in her pictorial work, gives equal importance to creative gestures and the final work. Her practice examines the basic components of the medium: canvas and paint and questions the place of vacuum, balance of forms, movement, the line and plan. About her approach towards a search for simplicity, purity, a return to the essence of painting, the artist says: “My approach aims to elicit the emotion with a minimalist language“. The circle is a pattern that she develops changes and declines in many ways; it becomes simultaneously witness of the gesture and trace of the raised action. Her interest in primitive art led her to further her research on traditional techniques of dyeing of fabric, including on indigo, fascinating color which crossed the centuries and which is a culture in its own right. Consequently, she combines her knowledge of textile and her interest in the ancient and natural colors in dyeing her own canvases. Stéphanie L’Heureux’s painting has something meditative, timeless, deep and essential. Her researches illustrate the transience of life and stops in a moment, a breath: Time.
An interesting link is created in their respective approaches: the accumulation for one and the series for the other. Richard Cloutier’s painting unfolds in the layering, the artist reveals, the chronology of the previous interventions on the canvas. While labor serial of Stéphanie L’Heureux repeats the motif of the circle tirelessly and calmly, like a mantra.
Beyond the similarities and contrasts that exist between the works of Cloutier and L’Heureux, the dialogue is done by the characteristics of the painting as a medium and thinking matter, “Ask an action, consider it, make a judgment, then respond to this gesture, there is an accumulation of decisions,” said Richard Cloutier. Despite their different approaches to painting, there are, in the work of Richard Cloutier and Stéphanie L’Heureux, quality, softness, poetry, as well as many references, be they architectural, historical or cultural.