Lot
29
Magnetic Margin

Acrylic on canvas, 2012

91 x 109 cm
Estimate
$6 250
With Magnetic Margin, my aim is to invite the viewer to travel along a tenuous edge between abstracted geological forms and atmospheric spatial illusion. The chief premise of the work is a negotiation of extremes. I created a central, dark solid mass that contrasts with peripheral light-filled zones. The work relies upon the movement of line, the direction of the painted gesture, and the edges of the forms, which create the illusion that there are several types of space at play. I chose the title Magnetic Margin to highlight the visual importance of anchor points — the little shards of different colours that collide with one another, and the moments when lines intersect. I am playfully making the comparison between an ionic charge and the visual dynamic forces within painting.
Biographical note

Mélanie Authier was born in Montreal in 1980. She received a BFA from Concordia University in 2002 and completed her MFA at the University of Guelph in 2006. Authier’s works have been exhibited across Canada. She is the recipient of the Honourable Mention Prize for the 9th Annual RBC Painting Competition (2007). Her work is in numerous national and international collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Loto-Québec, Desjardins, Royal Bank of Canada, TD Canada Trust Collection, Bank of Montreal, and the Department of Foreign Affairs. Authier’s paintings bring visual contradictions together into one imaginary space. Each painting presents a brimming jostle of pictorial oppositions coexisting in a dynamic exchange that stretches the limits of their points of reference, reveals elements of the irrational, and evokes unfathomable space. Her work presents a perpetual interplay between chaos and control, the synthetic and the organic, the technological and the natural, flatness and depth, the atmospheric and the geological. Each work is submitted to a free-form improvisation that draws upon an expansive archive of expressionist and hard-edge histories. The goal of her works is to conjoin a disparate, contrasted array of painterly facture to create a work that is disjunctive, but that is eventually resolved into a convincing, if disorienting, illusionism.

http://www.melanieauthier.com/
Represented by Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto