Exhibition on View In-Person & Online
September 3 – October 30, 2021
Artist Reception:
Saturday, September 25, 2021
2pm – 5pm
Patrice Charbonneau, Shoals, Installation View
First Floor, Lonsdale Gallery
Resonant Lines of Flight:
The Abstractions of Patrice Charbonneau
Essay Written by:
JAMES D. CAMPBELL
Hangar
2020
oil, acrylic and charcoal on linen
37 x 45 inches
$6,900
“Speed now illuminates reality
whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.”
Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear (1)
A gifted painter who fortuitously trained as an architect, Patrice Charbonneau’s work weds richly seductive sur- faces with scaffolding of the built environment in a heady and endlessly engaging mix. He conjures the hectic rhythms and dynamism of the inner city within paintings that cross borders, bridge uncertain latitudes and longitudes, and harbour ambiguous cartographies, which are overwhelmingly subtle and distinctive.
Patrice Charbonneau, Shoals, Installation View
First Floor, Lonsdale Gallery
Charbonneau is a committed abstractionist whose work incarnates speed as its modus vivendi. His paintings are profoundly astatic. The architecture here seems phenomenally on the move, and, conversely, the viewer is also put through his/her paces. We experience his paintings as though they are portable vortices constructed for imaginative projection. He builds his scaffoldings with sinuous lines that suggest a sensual understanding of shape and haptic grace. One of the truths of his painting is its attractive tactual dimensionality.
Showcase
2021
oil, spray paint, acrylic and charcoal on canvas
22 x 45 inches
$5,400
His work is akin to action painting when you consider the microstructures in his surfaces as he works them. This is especially true of his recent work with its glorious tangled skeins of paint; he builds up strata in sensuous feints and parries until he reaches the threshold. These Shoals, like the submerged ridges beneath the surface of water that are a hazard to navigation, displace the viewer, who must take continuing stock of his or her own coordinates in the sea of voluptuous paint. The swift eddies of water find their perfect mirror in the sensuous self-presence of the painted surface.
Override
2020
oil and charcoal on canvas
44 x 39 inches
$7,000
Patrice Charbonneau, Shoals, Installation View
First Floor, Lonsdale Gallery
Sémaphore II
2020
acrylic, charcoal, and aerosol on linen
33 x 41 inches
$6,300
I glimpse phraseologies in the paint handling that remind me of abstract expressionist master Willem de Kooning and fellow contemporary Canadian painter Martin Golland and also Bram van Velde. His gestural treatment of the paint application invests the work with rapid-fire and telegraphic bursts that ignite recognition and evoke the experiential sense of place. He is a master of restraint, never pushing things to the breaking point or over the edge, never one to flirt with excess when excess means loss of precision and cartographic specificity.
Charbonneau works not only from hard-won insights into the contemporary built world but from the deep archive of his own memories and experiences. They are, to him, a guarantor of truth and authenticity as he explores deeply personal narratives, across the face of lived space.
As we try and orient ourselves within his paintings, we experience an overwhelming sense of acceleration, spatial anamorphoses and perspectival variety. The “figures in the landscape” – the architectural forms around which all his work is focused – may be unfamiliar but the tropes of the built world and lived world can be identified in however shadowy a fashion. As the eye careens through and around cascading panes of what resembles dichroic glass, one has an incipient sense of perceptual hazard and a dizzying sense of inundation and speed.
Combles 4
2021
oil and acrylic on linen
33 x 41 inches
$6,300
Patrice Charbonneau, Shoals, Installation View
First Floor, Lonsdale Gallery
Tribute to Theodore Clement Steele:
Winter in Munich
2020
acrylic, crayons, and charcoal on canvas
43 x 45 inches
$7,500
Patrice Charbonneau, Shoals, Installation View
First Floor, Lonsdale Gallery
Antonomase II
2020
oil and charcoal on linen
21 x 27 inches
$3,700
Antonomase V
2020
oil and charcoal on linen
21 x 27 inches
$3,700
Patrice Charbonneau, Shoals, Installation View
First Floor, Lonsdale Gallery
Diptych: Preparations
2020
oil and charcoal on linen
16 x 32 inches
$3,900
Chromatically, the work is distinctive and unsettling. But it is never overly loud, brash or overwrought. Charbonneau is alert to the possibility of excess but his chroma always obeys the internal needs of the structural order of the painting. There is nothing whatsoever formulaic here: each painting announces its own identity as sovereign and unique.
An unusual fluency infects the temporal and the spatial along resonant Deleuzian lines of flight. Charbonneau lays on his acrylic paint with daunting rigor and voluptuous gesture. The sense of acceleration is the result of his painstaking ministrations to the painting’s microstructures.
Patrice Charbonneau, Shoals, Installation View
First Floor, Lonsdale Gallery
Dock
2020
oil, acrylic, and charcoal on linen
31 x 21 inches
$4,200
A-Frame
2021
oil, acrylic and aerosol on canvas
31 x 21 inches
$4,200
Filip Vostal, in commenting on the English translation of Hartmut Rosa’s seminal book Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung de Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne (2005) draws attention to a hallmark of late Modernity; namely, acceleration.(2) His discussion is indebted to Paul Virilio’s “dromology” as cultural critique, and this is true of Charbonneau’s work as well: it functions as a potent critique of lived space and the built world. Rosa suggests that acceleration of the pace of life is endemic to the way we live now. (3)
This brings us close to the heart of Charbonneau’s work: it moves at warp speed, has chromatic texture, multi- perspectival entry and exit points, constructive vigour and offers a beautiful modeling for the increasing social tempo of change.
Loos meet Tzara
2021
oil, acrylic and aerosol on canvas
44 x 20 inches
$5,100
Patrice Charbonneau, Shoals, Installation View
First Floor, Lonsdale Gallery
1. Paul Virilio, Bertrand Richard. The Administration of Fear, p.41, (MIT Press, 2012)
2. Filip Vostal, “Towards a social theory of acceleration: Time, moder- nity, critique” in European Journal of Social Sciences https://doi. org/10.4000/ress.2893
3. Translated as Hartmut Rosa. Acceleration and Alienation. Towards a Critical Theory of Late-modern Tempoality. (Aarhus: NSU Press, 2010)