Francine Savard - Tableau d'une exposition

2023 | FRANCINE SAVARD
TABLEAU D'UNE EXPOSITION
MONTREAL
Nov 9, 2023 - Feb 3, 2024

*D'après Magnet (Anne Truitt), série "Tableau d'une exposition"*, 2023,
acrylique sur toile,
25 x 38 pouces.

Blouin Division is pleased to present Tableau d’une exposition, an exhibition featuring two new series of work by Montreal painter Francine Savard.

Haunted by the idea of the monochrome, Francine Savard’s body of work is a long love story with painting, its histories, its tools, its formal properties and its poetic spaces. The artist’s process draws from multiple sources including photographic documents, various types of texts, geographical maps and library codes. Colour occupies a major role in the dynamics of this process.

The exhibition features a number polyptychs composed of irregularly shaped

canvases installed in various configurations. Although their surfaces remain invariably flat, judicious juxtapositions of flat colours create surprising effects of perspective and three dimensionality. Colour bars have often appeared in Savard’s work. This time around, they allude to the remarkable work of American artist Anne Truitt. The mysterious configurations of the shaped canvases draw their geographies from archival photographs of Truitts’s coloured columns installed in public exhibition spaces.

Photography and archival documents also play a key role in the second series in the exhibition. These include a dozen figurative paintings in shades of red, from burgundy to vermilion. Their images depict the presentation of artworks in exhibition and art conservation spaces. These are recognizable places, but they no longer necessarily exist in the form in which the images depict them. On the other hand, the exhibitions the artist introduces in the compositions are fictitious. Savard's red monochrome often recalls the flat saturated grounds of the Montreal Plasticiens. In these recent canvases, red also alludes to the red of the darkroom, when the images appear.