DEGREES of SPEARATION: Cindy Hergott Pellerin, Lorenzo Dupuis, Rob O’Flanagan
Reception: No reception
July 4 - August 1
Art Placement is delighted to bring together the work of three Saskatoon painters with different approaches to balancing abstraction and representation in their work.

Lorenzo Dupuis is a celebrated Saskatchewan artist working predominantly in traditional egg tempera. Active since the mid 1970s, he first established himself as a landscape painter working in oil, with thick, impasto surfaces. Transitioning to egg tempera almost two decades ago, his painting underwent a stylistic transformation as well. Increasingly abstract, though sometimes presenting recognizable subjects, Dupuis' current works are subtle and meditative, an organization of small, painterly marks in muted earthen tones that, in turn, coalesce into shapes and patterns that subtly reference nature’s geometry. Dupuis plays with contrasts in colour, value, and scale to create a striking sense of form and space in his paintings. Strategically varying the colour, value, and density of his hatch marks, he creates the illusion, from a certain distance, of three-dimensional forms that project outwards from the picture plane. Moving closer to the surface, the illusion dissolves and the paintings are seen, once again, as an interlocking matrix of marks on a two-dimensional surface, a masterful play with the dynamic opposition between appearance and reality that is arguably at the core of all serious painting.

"My work is not an attempt at a photographic description of nature. Rather, it is a view of nature sifted through my experience. My experience, of course, includes many things."

Cindy Hergott Pellerin is a process-based painter who produces rigorously composed abstract paintings infused with references to architecture, structures, geography, landscapes, and plant forms. In this newest series of paintings, Hergott Pellerin arranges and layers sequences of geometric shapes in varying densities and opacities to create complex, fluid compositions that keep the eye moving around, across, and into each picture. Contrasts in light and dark tones define the primary structure of each composition. Within this overarching tonal armature, colour is masterfully coordinated, seemingly simple and reduced to two or three dominant hues, but upon closer inspection with a variety and complexity that rewards deeper looking. Numerous colours, often a dozen or more, have been applied in overlapping semi-transparent layers and glazes, peeking through here and there in flashes of pure pigment, and in other areas optically mixing to create a myriad of new hues.

"Drawing inspiration from formalist and colour field painters, I focus on process and formal relationships. Beginning with spontaneous engagement with tools and materials, I cultivate a ground of uncertainty, intuitively allowing marks and forms to shape the pictorial field through addition and subtraction. The resulting convergence of overlapping planes suggests layered histories and sustains a continual process of exploration… While abstract, familiar references surface to engage the viewer, inviting sustained looking and the uncovering of latent narratives within the layers. By negotiating the space between abstraction and representation, the work develops a visual language that bridges these two genres."

Rob O’Flanagan is an artist and writer who blends abstraction, a love of colour, and a gift for storytelling in his paintings. Guided by feeling and intuition, he balances observation and reflection with spontaneity and play to ultimately discover resolution through the process of painting itself. His new large-scale paintings offer a wildly colourful and visually thrilling viewing experience. He juxtaposes flat patterned areas with vignettes of pictorial illusion that seem to push back into space. Sinewy, meandering lines, reminiscent of rivers, streams, paths or roadways, enclose areas of smaller, repeated shapes, just barely containing the pulsing energy that inevitably spills out and across each painting’s surface. Playing with scale and perspective, the paintings move between references to microscopic views and cellular diagrams, to the immense vastness of the prairie landscape viewed from above. Collapsing all this and more into a visually balanced composition, O’Flanagan’s paintings present a unique kind of narrative mapping that is disorienting in the best possible way.

"I am driven by the pure pleasure of painting and by the compulsion to disrupt a captivating surface with precarious amalgams not easily arrived at. Thoughts about the future of humanity, environmental ruin, the absurd, the sacred and the tragic are among my preoccupations while painting. When I am able to transcend the racket in my mind, intuition and spontaneity take its place."