Lot
18
Sans titre
Acrylic, acrylic lacquer, magazine collage, oil, on canvas mounted on canvas, 2021
41 x 30 cm
Estimate
$3 000
This work is the result of an exhibition project in preparation in which I explore the relationship between the model and the pictorial practice. Figurative painting involves, in many cases, work beforehand that remains in the shadows of the studio. My approach, for this project, makes explicit the process that leads me to the creation of a painting. The duplication of images and their mise en abîme are its operative vector.
Paradoxically, the model itself is invisible, whether it is struck on metal or represented by a painted image.
Biographical note
Nicolas Lachance lives in Montréal. Since obtaining his bachelor’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM (2009), he has had a dozen solo exhibitions including at Galerie René Blouin, Raising Cattle, Optica, and Fonderie Darling, where he had an artist studio in residency from 2013 to 2015. His works are in the collections, among others, of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, and many private collections.
In his heterogeneous pictorial practice, Lachance obstinately stalks the appearance and disappearance of the image through a series of paradoxes. The photographic metaphor serves as matrix for laborious manual labour; alteration haunts the duplication of the image; rebuses flirt with monochrome and post-conceptual installation. The notion of the filter structures these tensions on the pictorial surface, which becomes the perfect site for a capture: on the one hand, the filter subtracts, framing the inflow of matter, transforming it and regulating its effusion; on the other hand, it cultivates the traces of residues amassed in the studio (dust, found images, used objects), accumulating deposits that are palimpsests for previous work like catalysts that reconfigure the stitches of a stretched net—perhaps less to the image than to our gaze.