Artist joins fellow Quebecers at Toronto gallery
Marie-Josée Roy creates using metal
When Marie-Josée Roy went looking for a Toronto gallery, she called on one that provides what its owners describe as a hub for Quebec artists: the Thompson Landry Gallery in the city’s Distillery District.
The large gallery (6,000 square feet) represents about 40 artists, plus a further 16 in a nearby space who work in ceramics, wood, glass and jewelry. All are Quebecers. “Quebec artists are noted for their passion,” Joanne Thompson, co-owner with Sylvain Landry, said. “Their work grabs you with its colour, vibrancy, texture and fearlessness.”
No other artist does more than Roy with aluminum or steel tubing in 2-D or 3-D with such ease, Thompson said. “There’s a depth to her work that comes from her heart and soul.
“She puts her essence into every piece.”
Roy does it with welding tools and in a blacksmith’s forge.
She creates paintings on aluminum, and sculptures, many of them wall pieces, with steel, bronze, copper, iron bar and chrome.
The gallery is showing 60 of Roy’s pieces in an exhibition, Magnétisme, which opens Thursday. It comes just six weeks after the close of Guy Laliberté’s Gaia, his photographs taken from space.
“My figures explode” with gesture and movement, Roy said in an interview arranged around a trip to New York’s Take Two film festival. The Trois-Rivières-based artist stars in a 19-minute film by Guy Pelletier and Pierre Bundock of Montreal’s Panache Films. Hurricane Sandy interrupted that festival, but the film made it to one in Hamburg, Germany.
In Her Blacksmith Eye, which has no dialogue, will be shown at the vernissage for Magnétisme. It follows Roy as she creates two elongated steel figures that come alive in stop-action animation sequences. The film reflects Roy’s description of her sculpting process.
“A piece is finished when I feel life in the sculpture and within myself. ... If it doesn’t breathe, I start over.”
Gallery co-owner Thompson says Magnétisme ex- plores the ideas of what brings people together.
“Her pieces echo this understanding of human interaction and warmth, juxtaposed against the cooler metallic medium,” she said. “Her forms balance between fantasy and reality.”
Roy said her father, a welder and a teacher, influenced her. She studied intaglio, but she preferred drawing with a grinder on the copper matrix to the paper print made from it.
“Painting on metal gives me a deep light I can’t get on paper. And for sculpture, metal is malleable,” she said.
Jérôme Prieur, who finishes some of Roy’s wall sculptures with fine engraving, said “something is always boiling in her head.”
And indeed it is. As her brain boils, her figures ex- plode with a surfeit of metal rods or wires.
Magnétisme: Marie-Josée
Roy opens Thursday and continues to Dec. 9 at the Thompson Landry Gallery, 6 Trinity St., Toronto. For information and a teaser for In Her Blacksmith Eye, go to thompsonlandry.com. Other websites: mariejoseeroy.com and jeromeprieur.com.
If you can’t get to Toronto
to see art by Quebecers, go to the Marché St. Jacques, where figurative paintings by 36 of them are hanging in a vast space on the third floor.
Another art critic called it the best show in town, and I’m inclined to agree. There’s nothing here that has to be explained; it just has to be enjoyed.
This welcome cornucopia of painting talent comes from the young artists who run Décover magazine. They launch a new issue every two months with a vernissage that exhibits the work of the 10 artists featured in the magazine.
“The magazine is distributed free to draw new people into visual arts,” artistic director Micah Lockhart said.
On now is Les Refusés, the exhibition of figurative painting.
“This exhibition celebrates a figuration in which everything is permitted,” curator François Escalmel writes in Décover. “We have no fear of narration, of humour or the use of every iconography.”
Some of the artists have gallery representation, some are illustrators and others alternate between the canvas and the street, Escalmel writes.
The show ends Tuesday, but it’s open daily until then. Go in the Ontario St. entrance and walk up the stairs to the third floor.
Décover will launch its 19th issue on Friday in the rented space with a vernissage for the 20 artists featured in issues 18 and 19.
Then, on Nov. 28, there will be a vernissage for an exhibition of paintings destined for auction on Dec. 12.
Les Refusés continues until Tuesday at the Marché St. Jacques, 1125 Ontario St. E. Information: murmitoyen. com/154600. For information on Décover magazine, go to decovermag. com.
The Musée d’art contem
porain has won the 2012 Prix Publication awarded by the Société des musées québécois for the 500-page catalogue it produced for the 2011 Quebec Triennial.
In addition to providing information about each artist in the Triennial, the catalogue is a reference source for Quebec art.
Many of the artists in the Triennial were young, but the catalogue acknowledges their older and better-known colleagues in a glossary that both defines their art practices and names artists having similar approaches.