Gervais Deschênes

Painting
05.19–06.12.1994

In the pursuit of simplicity, Gervais Deschênes’ paintings seek to push their pictorial elements to the limits of abstraction through the juxtaposition of planes—surfaces painted with acrylic or laminated with wood (and, on other occasions, with laminate). These planes are treated as frames because they are worked on independently. These “shots” possess a quality that could loosely be described as “photographic” in that they aim to capture something that can only be captured through an arbitrary cropping and that precedes them (the grain of the wood or laminate). Certain parts refer as much to the tradition of interior scenes as to that of landscape painting. The choice and treatment of materials evoke furniture—its techniques, its meticulous modular construction, and its origin (wood, the forest). The pictorial treatment of the surfaces suggests a poetic landscape figuration that is both suspended and blurred (fog, snowfields, avalanches) and a material mimicry that at times powerfully evokes certain surfaces such as rusted steel. Although undeniably present, these simulations are not primarily exploited for their symbolic value but rather as an extension of the pictorial treatment (meta-representation). It is worth noting that the use of laminate (whose finish consists of a photograph of the grain of a particular wood species) invites a similar interpretation.