Acrylique sur toile, 2012
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.