Nicolas Grenier
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Pathos Schmathos, a presentation of paintings by Erik Olson, Edith Beaucage, and Nicolas Grenier at Art Toronto 2017. Pathos Schmathos features three Canadian artists using painting to elicit and manipulate existential and escapist feelings that reside with all of us. Pathos is a proposed path to persuasion and can be achieved through a good story, the passionate delivery of alleged story, or through a personal anecdote. A comparison of the portrait techniques adopted by Olson and Beaucage allow us to meditate on the composition of subjectivity and the effect that painting has on perceived reality.
Düsseldorf-based Erik Olson's expressive portraits offer many possibilities all leading back to a central question: how do we define the individual in this present moment? In response, Olson posits a series of questions: "Is it skin color? Gender or sexual orientation? The place a person lives? Can you understand the human psyche through innovations in neuroscience?" Olson deciphers existential human crises with every painting trick in the book from observation-based representation to eyes floating in monochromes to abstract shapes and tangles of all of the above. Olson generates busts, avatars, death masks, ideas, portraits, projections, and profiles, radiating outward in all directions to compile the very malleability of identity. The work oscillates between portraying the individual through an analytic sensibility and an intuitive approach, beyond knowledge.
Los Angeles-based Edie Beaucage created a series of paintings specifically for the Toronto Art Fair. In Fast Reverse Polychromatic Liquid Lines Modulator Beaucage's characters enact relationships exclusively "via" technology. In the painting You know Dax Too? (2017) we find three mustached men chatting on FaceTime; in What's Ur Snap (2017) a group of friends in the woods exchange Snap Chat information; in Scotch and Sofa (2017) a computer streaming Netflix is set on a living room table beside a pair of boots for movie night at home. Beaucage’s characters act out our lives today and her paintings feel as if we where looking through a pair of quantum-multicolor-night-vision-goggles. Dark impasto grounds support amalgams of fine strings of paint that pile up to create images. Akin to an analog 3D printer, these tangles of paint strings are extruded from syringes to make fancy pants, funky boots, background horses, inhabited cell phones, pink rocks, and pale blue trees, in keeping with Beaucage signature affective paint style: bouyant, confident, and vibrating with social energy.
Nicolas Grenier uses painting and the coding of colour to investigate political, economic, cultural, and social spaces. His interests lie in the distorted connections between the these systems and the principles or absence of principles at the root of these systems. His artworks translate theoretical and philosophical queries into visual and physical form. Grenier borrows freely from the language of architecture, design, abstraction, and diagrams to imagine dysfunctional models or structures that question the ways in which our current neo-liberal system shapes the social landscape.