Mathieu Lévesque

Lévesque is interested in painting as “subsculptural”, toward a kind of painting distinguished by its lavish and excessive materiality, reaching the boundaries of the sculptural. His work testifies a dialogue referential to relatively diverging pictorial traditions; action painting, shaped canvas, and bad painting. He frequently aims to reconcile complementary and disparate elements, or even components of a dichotomy, creating physical, aesthetic or semantic tensions. The action implied in the manipulation of the material upon its support is nonetheless highly relevant to his investigation into the fundamentals of the process of painting. He mainly works based upon the action, the process of making and the know-how to highlight distinctive attributes to the painter’s craftsmanship. However, his paintings, tinged with casualness and absurd humor, are built through industrial processes, and adorned with spontaneous gestures and a process-based quality. Ultimately, one could define Lévesque’s practice as an abstraction, one that is formalist though emphasizing on the material of the process, seeking to question the limits of painting through a playful sight.

Max Wyse

Max Wyse’s work is characterized by his particular technique and iconography. His inspiration comes from an ancestral view of painting on glass to create his works. The artist directly paints on the back of an acrylic paper sheet (Plexiglas) on which he works in consecutive stages, starting with outlining the foreground, then the second ground and so on. He is forced to produce his work in a reverse fashion, unlike traditional canvas painting. The reversed version of what the artist represented is actually the image that is revealed face view, to the spectator.

Wyse approaches his work in the manner of an archeologist: he searches for, collects and theorizes the things that inspire him. His works essentially rely on the idea that the human body is closely tied to the mineral, the vegetal and the animal. Throughout Wyse’s work, the human figure embodies a virtual hybrid that is at the intersection of three different worlds of species. The artist considers the human body as a vehicle able to travel across cultures, evolving through humanity, which mutate sometimes into mythical creatures or symbolic figures and spasms.

David Gillanders

David Gillanders is intrigued by the natural limits of perception and the inevitable imperfection of our understanding of things. He captures that imperfect gap between reality and what our own senses make of it through his delicate and smooth surfaces. If Gillanders works within the limits of abstraction, one can always find a way to anchor in the reality with flashes of recognition. Lately, Gillanders has been exploring the idea of maps and cosmic, where the language of paint creates small universes or as the artist stated, these are maps without legends.