Collection: Material Constellations

For Pictura, I wanted to ask a simple question: where does painting begin? The five artists in this exhibition, all of whom I represent, each answer it differently. Colour, pigment and paint run through every work, but they rarely stay where we expect them to.

Carole Baillargeon makes her own colours from plants gathered along the St. Lawrence. In Page 88, natural dyes and inks soak into handmade paper and settle into something like a rock face, crossed by a dark fissure and ancient-looking marks. Here pigment and support are one and the same. Marilyne Bissonnette moves painting into relief. In Grisette joue à la poupée avec Marine, dozens of porcelain cat heads, each glazed and painted with its own character, crowd together on a wooden panel, a portrait of belonging and singularity. Stéphanie Morissette pairs watercolour with digital printing. In Swarm of Black Hornets, a formation of reconnaissance drones hovers over a desert where irises still bloom, a scene of quiet menace drawn with her signature dark humour. Marianne Pon-Layus thins acrylic on canvas primed with clear gesso, so the bare canvas becomes the light of Hécate: a three-faced goddess holding a skull among a circle of women in embroidered dress, both powerful and ambivalent. Saul Sanchez turns the question around. In One Thing for Another (Rebus 9), oil on canvas takes on the appearance of a porcelain plate, its painted rebus waiting to be deciphered: image standing in for word, and painting standing in for object.

I chose these works for the way they answer one another. Real porcelain sits beside painted porcelain, and paper that becomes landscape beside canvas left to breathe. A crowd of cats echoes a swarm of drones and a circle of women. Together they form a constellation in which painting is less a medium than a way of thinking through matter. I am very proud to bring them together in one room.

Anne Jano, Director and Founder, Galerie JANO