Magalie Comeau
Signifiant non antérieurement défini
2009

Name: Signifiant non antérieurement défini
Brand: Magalie Comeau
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About

Magalie Comeau is an explorer. She finds spaces and scrutinizes them, taking time to mull over and dissect them in her mind. She then thoughtfully re-pieces these sites on her canvases. Rather than capturing the walls and floors of a building as they would appear in three-point perspective, Comeau twists and turns architecture, cross-sectioning and bending interiors outwards while further complicating her multifaceted horizons by subdividing the rooms, confusing inside and outside. They are dizzying propositions, and when she claims to have been visually overloaded from her investigations, I am not inclined to argue. She looks at how bodies (her own and others) interact with space, how we react and respond to the places that we inhabit. She thinks of these physical structures as distinct personalities that she is responding to, and that these skewed rooms become presences akin to people. These paintings evoke the city, its buildings and inhabitants. They are also reminiscent of the city’s grit, its dust clouds and the sprays of graffiti so prevalent in urban environments. Yet other images seem tranquil, dusky and domestic. Comeau does not choose one particular type of place to dissect and repurpose. In her recent work Le vertige de l'Architactrice, the centre of the image is a room with diffuse natural light and hardwood floors, evoking some kind of habitable structure. The setting is so welcoming that it becomes familiar. The execution of Comeau’s paintings is stunning, demonstrating a patient craftsmanship. She paints with oil in order to build complex colours and smooth blending. One element of her oeuvre that is extremely striking is her capacity for hard-edged painting. To achieve such sharp lines and well-defined shapes with oil is becoming increasingly rare in contemporary painting. Comeau’s paintings offer glorious juxtapositions of hard and soft, with their narrow corners and walls protruding into nowhere. They are improbable floor plans, with bursts of cloud and shadow obscuring the clean geometry of the sites. Greys and muted tones are shocked with unexpected regions of bright colour. These pops of red or blue or green become the focal points of the works. These paintings do not seem grounded in any reality that I have experienced, and yet I am inclined to try to unscramble each locale and try to discern what makes each canvas (and, by extension, each space depicted) so uncanny and disembodied while they are still warm with human presence. Magalie Comeau lives and works in Montreal. She graduated in Fine Arts at Concordia University in 2005. Since then her artwork has been exhibited across Quebec, in Shanghai and Toronto, and as part of other private and public collections. Using the medium of oil on canvas, she has been questioning the connection between the body and vital space. Several solo exhibitions dealing with marks of transformation have followed, among others at the gallery Art Mûr that represents her in Montreal. She has recently been invited to exhibit at the Confluences à la Maison de la Culture Frontenac, at the Regional Museum of Rimouski and at the Universal Exhibition Shanghai 2010. Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec selected one of her artworks as part of its Prêt d’oeuvres d’art program. Her work on counter-acceleration is exhibited in the Musée d’art de Joliette.

Details

Creator
Magalie Comeau (1982, Canadian)
Creation Year
2009
Dimensions
Height: 40 in. (101.6 cm)Width: 80 in. (203.2 cm)Depth: 2 in. (5.08 cm)
Medium
Canvas,Oil
Movement & Style
Abstract
Period
21st Century
Condition
Gallery Location
Montreal, CA
Reference Number
1stDibs: LU476224812
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