Patrice Charbonneau, L’appel des soubassements / Echoes from the recesses, 
Main Gallery, Lonsdale Gallery

“We are outfitted with senses that convey the surfaces of things…our ways of probing the viscera of the world is to turn them into yet more surfaces.”

Lorraine Daston, Against Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019)

Sheltering from the Eclipse
2023
oil, acrylic and spray paint on linen
53 x 47 inches
$8,900

Montreal artist Patrice Charbonneau invites audiences to glimpse under the surface of our daily realities. Charbonneau draws viewer’s attention to demi sous sols – subterranean spaces that exist beneath the surface. Exploring basements, bunkers, and underground shelters – man-made structures that occupy liminal spaces – to uncover the underlying psychology that mediates our experiences of these spaces.

Running down Corridors
2023
oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas
54 x 39 inches
$8,300

Combles 4
2021
oil and acrylic on linen
33 x 41 inches
$6,300

Patrice Charbonneau, L’appel des soubassements / Echoes from the recesses, 
Main Gallery, Lonsdale Gallery

Rendered in dynamic low angles, Charbonneau captures interior and exterior environments from multiple points of view. His use of vues en contre-plongées – a cinematic device of using a low angle shots – generates a sense of immediacy and tension. Charbonneau’s unique visual language and aesthetic sensitivity to rendering forms builds multi-layered narratives via his sophisticated network of lines and planes. Deliberately playing with perspective, the artist seeks to shed light on the multiple ways personal and shared cultural memories intersect in these spaces.

Courtyard and Chapel
2023
oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas
51 x 56 inches
$9,500

Study for Shell Scrape, (Diptych)
2022
oil, ink and charcoal on St-Armand paper
15 x 22 inches
$2,500

Patrice Charbonneau, L’appel des soubassements / Echoes from the recesses, 
Main Gallery, Lonsdale Gallery

Charbonneau’s latest exhibition sheds light on built spaces, which are perhaps frequently overlooked, to unearth how they form and shape our immediate realities. He loosely engages with the allegory of Plato’s cave, using it as a launching pad for his sustained investigation into what shapes our behaviours. Plato’s meditation on the nature of belief versus knowledge begins by describing prisoners who have lived their entire lives chained inside a cave. They watch shadows cast on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, believing this to be their reality, as they have known nothing else. According to Plato, the shadows represent the fragments of reality perceive through the senses, versus the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.

Diptych: Preparations
2020
oil and charcoal on linen
16 x 32 inches
$3,900

Vigil
2023
oil, acrylic and spray paint on linen
53 x 47 inches
$8,900

As described by New York art critic Donald Kuspit:

“Charbonneau’s paintings seem loose-knit—full of patchy, shifting forms, as shoals are […} It is this ambiguity—the double meaning of shoal—that gives them their strange profundity, their evocative power, unconscious meaning, for the self-dramatizing forms are expressions of energy, inherent–seemingly “instinctive”–to nature.” Charbonneau’s paintings emphasize the power of perception. He presents viewers with a complex vision that obfuscates the visual delineation between what is situated above and below ground. He seeks to break free from a limited vision of the evidently perceivable. Instead, he prioritizes forms and concepts to achieve a higher understanding of what shapes our realities and experiences.

Patrice Charbonneau, L’appel des soubassements / Echoes from the recesses, 
Main Gallery, Lonsdale Gallery

Contre-Plongée II
2022
acrylic & charcoal on St-Armand paper
15 x 11 inches
$1,500

Wooded Shell Scrape
2023
oil on panel
16 x 16 inches
$2,800

Patrice Charbonneau, L’appel des soubassements / Echoes from the recesses, 
Main Gallery, Lonsdale Gallery