Painting, sketchwork, photography, and performance art are on display at La Rentrée, highlighting pieces by Eliza Griffiths, Pierre Dalpé, and Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte that explore themes present in contemporary art.

Love,  Alienation, and Free Association 

Eliza Griffith’s suite of paintings and drawings explores issues of need, estrangement, intimacy, gender identity, and sexuality, is the most striking of the three installations.

Colour—warm pinks, deep reds, and bright blues and greens—immediately draws the viewer closer to Griffiths’s large tableaux. Griffiths plays with colour and form in a seemingly impressionistic, yet ultimately, contemporary layering method that defines the interaction between subjects. Focus is a visually important aspect of her work, and realism blends in to the unfinished and unreal. The eye is pulled involuntarily towards the center of each tableau where the focus is sharpest, and line and colour are most polished. Towards the edges, form becomes a vague suggestion, with one figure in People Searching for Peace of Mind Through Psychoanalysis—Grief noticeably lacking a foot.

The content of Griffiths’s paintings is absorbing. Each piece feels like a film still, leaving the viewer incomplete, and compelled to learn more. Viewers may find themselves wishing the characters would move, so that a deeper understanding of what is happening might be reached.

Of the twelve paintings, four are particularly impactful. In Convalescence, a figure relaxes in a classic pose; makeup is smeared clumsily across its face, like a child trying on her mother’s lipstick for the first time. Upon a second look, this figure reveals itself to be a man. In Head of Steam, an exhaling male face takes up the entirety of a large canvas; his huge brown eyes are transfixed on the viewer, and framed by a shock of blue eyeshadow. In Situation/Hassle, an androgynous figure holds the shoulders of a young man and woman arguing. Finally, Interval (Green Interior) depicts a man and woman in the foreground; the woman is nude and clean-faced, hair pulled back, whilst the man wears an open green shirt and matching eyeshadow, and appears as if he is about to speak. This last painting is particularly effective at evoking the viewer’s curiosity.

The artist’s charcoal sketches are darker, both visually and thematically. Ripped pages and inksplots feature in this corner of the exhibition, applied in loose strokes and shadowy outlines. The interaction between forms and people is present here once more, where shape emerges stealthily from line and squiggle; each seemingly isolated, but somehow woven together.  A male nude reclines on an ottoman with the words “I love you” scrawled behind him; a woman sprawled on the ground is complemented by the deeply affecting phrase “Love is a funny thing, you don’t know it’s real until it’s caused you pain.”

Though often perplexing, this part of La Rentrée is particularly thought-provoking and not to be missed.

Personae

This portion of the exhibit consists of Pierre Dalpé’s work in photography, and is easily summed up by Oscar Wilde’s quote, printed on the wall between two pictures: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.”

Here, men and women in groups of one, two, and finally three are photographed in costume, often in drag. The viewer is presented with a glimpse of people’s private lives, and although each subject directly regards the viewer, the feeling is distinctly voyeuristic. Bondage, bedroom life, ballerinas, clowns, and a Toreador all figure here. Most notably, two actresses (who are indeed men in drag), sit at their makeup table backstage and apply makeup to melancholy faces while a man and a mannequin observe.

Dalpé shoots in colour as well as in black and white, with interesting uses of mirrors and symmetry that toys with the idea of reflections. These are the most enjoyable aesthetic elements of Dalpé’s pieces, and are responsible for his visual success.

Interstitial Stillness

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte’s piece, on display as a video playing in the Ste-Catherine Street vitrine, is by far the most perplexing of all the works on display. The artist defines interstices as negative, “non spaces” within construction in public areas. In this piece, she attempts to physically explore these “non spaces” through “non actions,” and the video documents the involuntary twitches of her body as she tries to remain still while draped over a staircase support. It’s an intriguing and imaginative concept, but perhaps not one that is well expressed, although I visitors are encouraged to stop by the vitrine on their way out and see what they think.

La Rentrée is bursting with provocative, evocative, and controversial themes which are, more often than not, successfully conveyed to the audience.

This exhibit runs until October 12th at Concordia University’s FOFA Gallery. Admission is free.