Lot
22
Because it's there 2
Oil on canvas, 2008
122 x 122 cm
Because it’s there is the only answer mountain climbers give to justify their useless quest. A vanishing point that literally disappears into the clouds, suggesting dissolution and loss of bearings. The intractable immensity is a perfect complement to solitude and loss. Perspectives are fragmentary, disrupted by plummeting depths, disrupting the spectator’s gaze. An attitude in which the human being neither disciplines nor territorializes, neither claims nor tames the environment, acquiesces rather to its magnitude, to its whims and its movements, as one does to those of one’s medium.
Biographical note
Dominique Gaucher was born in Saint-Hyacinthe. In 2001 he received an MFA from the Université du Québec à Montréal. For over twenty years Gaucher has worked as a backdrop and scenery set painter for opera, theatre, and local as well as big-budget American film productions. In parallel to this career he has practiced painting professionally since 1996.
In his works Gaucher essentially plays on the border separating reality from fiction by using and diverting the self-referential strategies inherited from modernist painting. For a long time used in strictly formalist terms, these strategies are now being employed by Gaucher to implement figurative representations that at first glance reveal misperceptions. Though these references—which combine and mix outside and inside, interior and exterior and, more specifically, the world of artistic creation and the natural environment—could recall certain images by Magritte, his pictorial world is more in resonance with hyperrealist scenes than surrealist visions.
He has participated in many exhibitions in Montreal in the Maisons de la Culture network, Galerie de Bellefeuille and Art-Mûr, the Centre National d’Exposition de Jonquière, and the Douglas Udell Gallery in Vancouver and Edmonton. In 2008, he was invited to take pat in the Québec Gold event in Reims. He will exhibit in Vancouver on the occasion of the 2010 Olympics. His paintings are part of many national and international collections.