Printer-friendly version--January 18, 2012.
“New Old Masters” is an expression coined by Donald Kuspit, the distinguished New York art critic, to describe contemporary figurative painters who reinterpret or even expropriate the work of the Old Masters. Both painters France Jodoin’s and Kevin Sonmor’s works, who live in Cowansville and work in the region, could well answer this description. The exhibition is sponsored by Financière MD.
Rare signs of a human presence, the sailboats of France Jodoin seem defenseless before the violence and immensity of the sea, lost at the point where it merges with the sky. Creating silhouettes of boats without sails, barely sketched in, tossed by the turbulent waves or floating in the mist of calmer seas, her sea-scapes are at the same time studies of traditional subjects in art history and a reflection on pictorial space. In the same way, the work of Kevin Sonmor is nourished by ambiguities. Specifically, he matches bits of classical subjects – flowers, fruits, still lives, horses – with a more contemporary technique, a spontaneous brush-stroke, a texture modern and fluid, with a powerful colorization. Both artists bring time to a halt, freeze a moment, tell a story or a narrative, in a space where a strange sadness or a vivid emotion is expressed by a deep comprehension of painting itself, by the exploration of texture, between a kind of reality and an evident theatricality.
When looking at a France Jodoin painting, one recognizes a fluidity of purpose both in the making and the viewing. A sense of something becoming, for a moment, then slipping away. France Jodoin is a painter of moods and must, as such, labour from her intuition. There is no time or space here for pedestrian details or mundane specifics, only for directions…Abstraction becoming figuration, stillness dissolving into movement, air into water, architecture into mist.
France Jodoin France Jodoin was born in Sainte-Madeleine (Quebec). She lives and works in Cowansville, in the Eastern Townships of the province of Quebec. She studied at the University of Ottawa and the Ottawa School of Art (Ontario) and at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal (Quebec). Jodoin’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada and in the United States. She is represented in several important private and public collections. She is a member of l’Atelier Circulaire de Montréal. Her work will be exhibited in Paris in 2012.
Every work of art tells a story. There is a story behind every painting – that tells of the painter’s work, of the painter and his life, his career and choices, and the story of the spectator who projects part of himself into what he sees. To begin with, Kevin Sonmor works by addition, never following a predetermined logic. He places an object somewhere on the canvas and builds around it. It may be a piece of fruit, a horse, a square of cloth that gives the impression of having been laid on the corner of a table. The rest is determined by the material, interplay and perspective, colour choices, serendipity, uncontrolled movements. Little by little, the painting asserts itself. In the end, it is never a question of time – a picture may take several hours to paint, sometimes months or years – but a question of balance. (Bernard Chassé)
Kevin Sonmor was born in Lacombe, Alberta, in 1959. He was educated at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary and the Banff Centre, Alberta. He received his Masters Degree in Fine Art from Concordia University, Quebec. Sonmor’s paintings have been exhibited across Canada and the United States, and are represented in many important public and corporate collections. Currently, Kevin maintains a studio in Dunham, Quebec.