April 2013
Francois Escalmel
April 5 – 28, 2013
Vernissage Friday April 5 / 7-10pm
Underpopulated
This new series of drawings on canvas vibrates with the free spirit of early surrealist collages.
Different styles cohabit: old cartoons shake hands with a certain fanzine’s naive stance. To me, everything is fair game, everything that can be manipulated into poetry!
These pictures are not pretty! The surface is coarse and you feel the rawness of the crayon, as if a child had drawn on a wall.
Otherwordly, the characters stumble between a sense of drama and low comedy. They act in deceptively narrative or simple stories. Don’t be fooled! In the great expanse of white where sometimes space itself disappears, metaphysics are sure to be at play!
François Escalmel
More and more my paintings have an air of re-routed fairy-tales. These made-up stories, inhabited by well-defined characters are given a contemporary spin and explore themes that I hope resonate with our current times. When I create a painting, I’m not looking for a coherent narrative. I prefer elusiveness, mystery. It’s a search for the point of reunion between the universal and the individual. In the complex experience of painting, an emotional sense is given, disclosed by a myriad of possible interpretations, an invitation extended to the viewer to create meaning.
Increasingly, I find myself looking to the recent past for the sources of my iconography. I’m tapping in the luscious brushstrokes of the golden age of illustration. I’m also searching for inspiration in the shaky patented magic of traditionally made cartoons (dessin animé). These are not merely appropriated but reenacted (with make-up and costumes). Tales, subverted, fractured, open-ended, re-formed, re-imagined, given a new life, a new voice to comment on contemporary events. And so the past merges with the present, high art and popular culture mesh, embrace and speak volumes!
This diversity of references is given an echo in the representation of space. Verisimilitude is at times breached. Gone is the box-shaped, unifying perspective. Objects, decors and sometimes even people lose their depths, tonality gives way to hard flat colors. Space folds and unfolds between the second and the third dimensions. While it is important for me to draw the viewer in, I also relish sometimes in cutting the illusion open: the artifice is exposed, believability dies and a few inches away is born again! At the core of these explorations are questions of existence and identity.
I’m a storyteller working with the absence of words. A grassroots revisionist of my personal history. With an attitude that oscillates between fascination and criticism, I strive to create dark and comical fables, that I hope, are relevant. Improbable combinations that emotionally ring true, affirmative expressions of the human experience. »
Biography:
Born in 1969, Ottawa, Canada. Lives and works in Montreal.
François Escalmel has held many successfull solo and group exhibitions in Europe, the United States and in Canada. In 2006, he had the honour and pleasure of having many pieces included in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. And in 2009, his work was featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO).