PIERRE-YVES GIRARD | POLYMORPHIA EN «D» LYRE MINOR

PIERRE-YVES GIRARD | POLYMORPHIA EN «D» LYRE MINOR

Room 2

Pierre-Yves Girard

POLYMORPHIA EN «D» LYRE MINOR

EXHIBITION /
AUGUST 25 TO OCTOBER 8, 2005

Pierre-Yves Girard completed a BFA at UQAM. Our invitation to exhibit is a first occasion for him to present a solo show in a professional context. Girard's pictorial universe is absolutely unique and is radically different from that in which painters have, over recent years, trained our gaze to travel. His work reminds one of Bosch and Breughel, and the artist commits himself to hyper-detailed fictional spaces and explores, in depth, the simple yet demanding techniques and artistic possibilities offered by oil painting.

Pierre-Yves Girard, a recent graduate of UQAM, presents Polymorphie en D'Lyre mineur, his first solo show in Montreal. In his pictorial work, Girard gives free range to his penchant for fictional landscapes. His style finds generous inspiration in the great shadowy spaces and complex architectures of the science-fiction universe. The theme of imaginary civilizations allows him to structure his artistic thought outside of the constraints of quotidian and historical reality's limits, explains the artist.

Girard's oils are packed with signs whose organization tends to create the impression of continual expansion. Using the play of symmetry, repetitions and dissolves from one figure to another, he exploits the total pictorial space, annihilating any distinction between figure and ground. He modulates forms by the controlled application of colour so as to create volumes and voids that invert and penetrate each other, and he combines perspectival points of view that multiply the effects of depth. Girard's pictures, difficult to grasp in their entirety, use their swollen density to generate a multitude of microenvironments that evoke the frenzy of mutating worlds, of vanishing worlds that dissolve as other worlds hatch into life.

While his paintings indicate an attempt to master the caprices of the material, a not negligible place is left to chance and the energy of the artist's gesture in the handling of paint. Putting aside any form of intellectualism, Girard privileges a state of mind that values intuition over science, a question of abandoning oneself to the logic and unexpected potential of the material.

NdeB translated by PduB

A native of Chicoutimi, Pierre-Yves Girard completed his bachelor's degree in visual arts at UQAM in the Spring of 2005. He presented his first solo exhibition at the Maison des arts et de la culture de Chicoutimi en 2004.