In his drawings on mylar, Jean-Sébastien Denis creates an unstable visual space by the interaction and accumulation of disparate elements spread on the surface. His recent work draws on the intersection between the palpable and the virtual that typifies our current reality. Bold coloured marks interact with subtle gradations and layering of black and white washes, lines and active drawing.
“Translating the chaotic multiplicity and resulting movement, preferring troubled spaces and uncertain issues, the key to my efforts is to create an unstable visual space by the interaction and accumulation of disparate elements spread on the surface. At the beginning, the surface is like a laboratory, the receptacle of pictorial experiences and diverse graphical information. The challenge consists then in creating the connections between different experiments, then, starting with these new relationships, provoking other accidents. These accumulations and tangled relational attempts eventually upset the stability of visual perception. The work stresses the process of production of the images at least as much as the images themselves,” Jean-Sébastian Denis.
Montreal artist Jean-Sébastian Denis received a BA in Visual Arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) in 1997. Denis has exhibited in many group and solo exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal and Florida, USA. Denis also curated the 2010 exhibition “Dessins” at the Maison de la culture Frontenac in Montreal, and has received grants from the Counseil des arts et des letters du Quebec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Studio 21 returned last week from Art Wynwood, an art fair in Miami. We exhibited six artists and sold pieces by Alex Livingston, David Sorensen and Jean-Sebastien Denis. In November, we were in Chicago at a fair called SOFA and in October it was Art Toronto. Attending art fairs is a way to find new…
Read MoreJean-Sébastien Denis’s drawings on Mylar at Studio 21 bring to mind psychogeographic mapmaking in their assemblage of lines and dots. Black and white is the dominant colour theme throughout, but the Montreal artist breaks up these visual fields with splotches of colour from bright red to various neons. The work is meant to convey the…
Read MoreWhile digital imagery is often cold or alien, Alex Livingston creates exciting, luminous environments of hotly coloured lines. They are jungles or sea beds or magic forests begging a viewer to brush aside the hanging ropes and enter. Livingston, a Nova Scotia artist and NSCAD University painting professor, has had a long, successful career as…
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