CHANTAL LAVOIE - Click here for PDF
The bottom purified by a distant landscape hardly sketched on the horizon and together with a scene signed by the earthy and ochre nuances of a monochrome palette reduced where the animated lines of the interlaced bare bodies structure the space, the works to the mixed techniques of Chantal Lavoie join a speech on the collective memory the concerning tracks in which lives of the human body expose themselves under the distortion of a ravaged and merciless reality.
Beyond the paradoxes which shake it constantly and of an obsessive way between youth and old age, beauty and decline, desire and fear, vitality and suffering, membership and solitude, its aesthetic intention expresses itself in the transcendence of the life and the end of the body which enjoys, suffers, is transformed in its various ages and becomes dust. So, the body of Chantal Lavoie's works, "a fragile membrane which stretches, crumbles off until become crisp" as the artist would say, sets up itself as the essence of its inspiration and becomes alternately the subject versus the support of the picture to evoke its sufferings, create intense awareness on its finality at the tax inspector and bring nevertheless a poetic or critical glance on the human nature.
In the madness of the numerous fights which are engaged between the creator and her work, is it the nude as classic subject in art history which fascinates ultimately the artist? Or rather the reflection of the contemporary cultural faiths which surround the image of the body and try to get free of it?
Shaking the nudes
For more than ten years, Chantal Lavoie has been interested in the representation of the body, whether it is a young person or an old man, healthy or a patient, a lover or abandoned, male or female, applying to criticize the various ideological codes on which it's based. Making it, she conceives a plastic language, the purpose of which is to shake the perception in which the western culture has concealed the human body since antiquity until our days.
So, the bare body as the garment suddenly becomes the work, carrying of a sense of direction the intention of which is rarely dedicated to the only aesthetic pondering. However, legitimate questions arise, whoever would scrutinize the paintings would understand, what started this interest for the human body, which the artist expresses in her pictorial language. It seems that the work of educator in geriatrics, which she practiced well before to become a painter full-time as she is today, it brought her to open questionings of type existentialism.
From then on, nothing interested Chantal Lavoie but wonder about the finality of the human body and about its states in continual metamorphosis through time. These images of the bare bodies, presented in couples loving, solitary or often flogged by time, disease or carnal depth of the suffering which Chantal Lavoie paints through mixed techniques which put together gaily on the painting, try to fix the track of the body congealed in precise movements, speaking especially about its desire to exist eternally and to transcend the death. In the formal treatment of bodies, one seized inevitably an immense fear, a sudden discomfort, even a strong denial which the artist feels in front of the dead. Suddenly, we wonder, what type of nude does the artist want to represent? Unique or symbolic bodies?
Almost in the style of the painters German expressionists of the beginning of the last century, Chantal Lavoie takes a malicious delight drawn from the iconography of distorted bodies and ravaged by the too abrupt change of a western society in perpetual transformations to create various compositions animated by the intervention of a landscape at the bottom of the painting, which participates of this state of solitude in which these bare bodies appear, unknown and without age. Paradoxically, these bodies powerfully structured in their formal treatment, always occupying the foreground or the center of the picture, seem to go into the bucolic landscape which reigns in the background. The reading of the subject becomes suddenly interrupted, even disturbed by the presence of a too distant and unmoved nature which is delighted to sketch the deep winks in the ancient landscapes of the Italian revival.
In their muscular and fibrous representation, heightened by monochrome tints of the burned browns, Chantal Lavoie's nudes also remind us of the studies sketched by the big painters of the Florentine Cinquecento to register its aesthetic initiative in a more classic approach of the represented subject. In spite of the integration of the pictorial contemporary techniques, as the collage mixed in the charcoal, in the acrylic very diluted, in the oil worked in transparent layers and in the pastel. The comments of the artist quoted below testify of this fact:
"The composition takes shape and even deforms according to my aesthetic requirement by becoming attached to the fine thread of the present. I shall define my approach as being rather a classic. At first I work with the dry charcoal. It is with this medium that I distort the merciless reality of the life of the body which then leaves the imprint on the surface of the canvas, or sometimes disappear until it leaves only a track before another one is born and takes its place."
Chiefly, this type of representation of the symbolic nude, setting up itself as criticism of a society, which grants too much importance to the outside beauty and for the short-lived, joins time in a logical of liberation of the body. Which was started by the artists of the 1960s, like Yves Klein, Francis Bacon, or later in Quebec by Betty Godwin, one of the biggest influences in Chantal Lavoie's work.
Monochrome vibrations
Animated at first by the urge to create a pictorial space where lines and material quarrel on the two-dimensional place such as a picture, abstracted to encircle a kind of synthesis between the representation of the body and the materialism of the colors which symbolize the earth or to express simply the moment of an emotion through the curve sensitivity and deformed by a line, Chantal Lavoie manages to communicate a kind of dichotomous essence, which settles down in the fragility of the being versus the strength of the earth, which sees the body being born and disappearing in its own tracks.
White canvas fields seem as bare, as the image of naked bodies, which are outlined under an almost automatic gesture of paint. In this harmony, these bare spaces annul any limit which could appear between the visible world and the energy of the invisible universe, so that suddenly life confides in it and takes place there. Only the horizon steers the complexity of a composition purified by the canvas to confine inevitable life in perpetual cycles which bodies demand. Concentrating on this way of applying the almost monochrome paint, Chantal Lavoie answers the questions of type existentialism. It is enough to look at her beautiful painting 'The Eden' for example, of which the title is suggesting to include the vision of the artist through the technique of the monochrome. The couple which is outlined in the painting seems to have a dialogue at the level of shy physical gestures.
By this formal incompletion or rather by this "confusion of kinds" and especially by the indistinctness of the age of the represented nudes, the artist indeed wants a bigger reception of her work and to touch various social categories.
So, this type of representation of the bare body stretches towards the universal and timeless continuity. Nature versus culture, the representation of the body Chantal Lavoie shows is sometimes the tragedy of the human condition, namely in its final states of decline.
EDUCATION
2002
Université Bishop
Beaux-Arts en studio
1999-2000
Académie des Arts et Beaux Arts, Composition, dessin, histoire, modèle vivant, paysage
1993-1999
Artisans du meuble québécois,Attestation en décoration
1984-1987
Collège Marie-Victorin, DEC technique d'éducation spécialisée
INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS
23 A.-6 May '08
Galerie Lamoureux Ritzenhoff, Histoire en soi, Montréal (Canada)
16-28 May 2008
Terence Robert Gallery, It doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said, Ottawa (Canada)
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
April 2008
Expo vente Galerie l'Harmattan
December 2008
Soirée bénéfice Make-A-Wish Evening, Galerie MX Montreal (Canada)
December 2007
Galerie MX, soirée 12x12, Montréal (Canada)
Las Olas Fine Arts, Christmas 12x12 event, Fort Lauderdale (USA)
April 2007
Galerie l'Harmattan, Expo-vente printanière de la région de Montréal, Pointe-Claire (Canada)
June 2007
Galerie MX, soirée Rendez-vous, Montréal (Canada)
November 2006
Galerie l'Harmattan, Exposition Automnale annuelle,Montréal (Canada)
March 2006
Las Olas Fine Arts, Strawberries?Champagne,Fort Lauderdale, Floride (USA)
Mar.-April 2006
Galerie l'Harmattan, Exposition printanière annuelle,Pointe-Claire (Canada)
November 2005
Galerie l'Harmattan, Exposition Automnale annuelle,Montréal (Canada)
PERMANENT COLLECTIONS
Las Olas Fine Arts Gallery, Fort Lauderdale (USA)
Galerie MX, Montréal (Canada)
Galerie l'Harmattan, Baie Saint-Paul, (Canada)
Galerie Lamoureux Ritzenhoff, Montréal (Canada)
Harbour Gallery, Mississauga, Ontario (Canada)
Terence Robert Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario (Canada)
Rosetta Stone Fine Arts, Florida (USA)
CORPORATE COLLECTIONS
Canbec Constructions inc., Lachine, QC
Deman Design. Montréal, QC
Alyn Simard Audio, Montréal, QC
EVENTS
December 2008
Don d'une oeuvre et participation à la Levée de fonds pour la Fondation Fais-Un-Voeu. Charity fund raising for Make-A-Wish Foundation.
ARTICLES
BERNIER, Robert, Chantal Lavoie: Corps Intime, Parcours, vol. 14, no 2, printemps-été 2009, p.68
LUNGU, Florentina, B.A., M.A. Chantal Lavoie: Traces - Histoire en soi, Vie des arts, vol.210, Printemps/ Spring 2008, p. 86-87.
BERNIER, Robert "Chantal Lavoie: Les états du corps!", Parcours, vol.11, no 2, Août-Septembre/ August-September 2005, p. 70.
BERNIER, Robert, "Chantal Lavoie: Le paysage de ton corps", Parcours, vol.11, no 2, Août-Septembre/August-September 2005, p. 36.
