2020 | TAMMI CAMPBELL, NICOLAS LACHANCE, FRANCINE SAVARD & YOSHIHIRO SUDA
MONTREAL
Oct 8 - Nov 14



TAMMI CAMPBELL, NICOLAS LACHANCE, FRANCINE SAVARD & YOSHIHIRO SUDA

Oct 8 - Nov 14, 2020

In this new four-artist exhibition, Tammi Campbell, Nicolas Lachance, Francine Savard, and Yoshihiro Suda demonstrate the unexpected rewards of viewing formalism through a rationalist lens. Blending painting, sculpture, and photography, each of the artists constructs their personal archive of history and memory, revealing the rich meaning inherent in colour, texture and form.

Tammi Campbell is both archivist and illusionist. Here, in a visual riddle, she has reproduced Ellsworth Kelly and Barnett Newman paintings, covering them with bubble wrap and cardboard made entirely of acrylic paint. The concealment of these canvases reminds us of their physicality - a quality Kelly and Newman prized in their work. Though she has mostly covered the thrumming reds of Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, her zip-like masking tape summons, with reverence and humour, the ghosts of modernism.

For the largest installation of his career, Nicolas Lachance has cast, in violet-hued paper pulp, several disused storage shelves. The shelves recall a former era in Montreal, when textile companies occupied his Park Avenue studio. Embossed with striations and impregnated with rust, the purple panels explore the memory of materials. Lachance’s work is often haunted by his various phases of colour application and marked by assiduous repetition. Here, his layered patinas pervert the materials beyond easy recognition, revealing and disguising in equal measure.

Francine Savard’s practice draws heavily from art history, often homing in on the formal elements that define the canon. In this exhibition, a shaped green canvas refers to a fragment from one of Fernand Leduc’s paintings. Superimposed with text from an essay on Leduc’s work, the painting questions whether language can ever adequately convey a visual experience.

Elsewhere, Savard’s two large grids of russets, crimsons and vermillions are a sublime treatise on redness. The Judd-like boxes cast shadows on one another until what might have been an instructive colour chart throws red into question, perplexing as much as it enthralls.

Through his exceptional carving ability, Yoshihiro Suda underlines longstanding aspects of Japanese culture, including traditional Japanese painting’s reverence for and imitation of the natural world. Tiny and delicate, Suda’s deftly-carved blossom assumes the burden of perfection, dawning on the viewer much as plants bloom and as the piece itself was made – very slowly, very delicately.

To schedule a visit or make inquiries, please contact us at info@blouin-division.com.