PICTORIAL RESEARCHES
Adèle Beaudry, Sonia Haberstich, Caroline Lindsay Hart, Daniel Oxley, Cameron Skene
Curated by Benjamin Klein and Trevor Kiernander
The Stewart Hall Art Gallery is delighted to announce Pictorial Researches, a group exhibition that is part of the Pictura event this autumn in Montréal which aims to promote and contextualize the art of painting in our time, and in our city.
This exhibition showcases the varied and various works of five experienced and committed Montréal painters, all of whom have spent their careers deeply investing their time and considerable talents into the creation and furtherance of contemporary painting. These artists—Adèle Beaudry, Sonia Haberstich, Caroline Lindsay Hart, Daniel Oxley, and Cameron Skene—were selected because they represent a wide and visually diverse field of aesthetic interests and strategies within painting, and because they are all achieved, mature artists with personalized, evolved styles and approaches to their studio practice. Each enters the domain of abstraction within pictorial art to varying degrees and with various kinds of imagery, skillfully balanced with non-objectivity, with aplomb and with individual vision. All have found well-defined signature styles, and the means of both intellectual and emotional expression within the field of contemporary painting.
Adèle Beaudry’s practice is conducted as a kind of pictorial research, a genuine search for a painting result that is complex and considered, resolved and satisfying. She has experimented with her supports, media, palette, imagery, methodology, everything. Her stance within abstraction tends to the biomorphic, employing an imagery of figure/ground relationships that beguile, imply and suggest a world of forms, rather than allow themselves to be reduced to an ideology or an otherwise certain form of depiction or symbology.
Sonia Haberstich’s painting practice is tempered by many other artistic approaches and forms of communication than traditional painting, including sculpture and installation as well as ceramics and even printmaking. She has a large skill set and possesses an assured, effective touch with all of her materials. Her work is playful, deeply enjoyable and filled with light and chroma; it is only with a certain amount of looking that we start to see the subtler and darker images, ideas and forms of suggestion that emanate from within.
Caroline Lindsay Hart’s beautifully fluid, expressive paintings contain and conceal a cosmos of imagery and reference, while always resolving into wonderfully finished and assured lyrical abstractions. They possess a particular luminosity that is both purely visual and poetic, and also a personal philosophy that is imaginative and learned. They can be darkly sombre and vibrating with lightness—often, they are both of these things at once, paradoxically managed and unified in a single canvas.
Daniel Oxley’s rich and strange works visually combine a powerful use of colour with variegated and sensitive use of oil paint, in the service of an esoteric, private spiritual vision—but one which is nonetheless accessible and moving to perceive and interact with. It is precisely the formal qualities of these paintings that activate the personal metaphysics found here, where the realm of symbols and soul fuse and magnify paint and colour, and vice versa.
Cameron Skene is a strong believer in the expressive properties of oil paint, and he is a skillful, serious and direct manipulator of the material. Exhibiting a natural virtuosity with the paint that is tempered by his literate, thoughtful intellection, he creates challengingly visceral and yet beautifully realized abstractions. The work employs an all-over formalist approach, but maintains a healthy self-awareness with regard to the possibility of going too far, overdoing it. The results produce powerful, but digestible, expressive pleasures.
The Stewart Hall Art Gallery treasures our relationship with our visiting public and with the wider art community. It is our profound hope and wish that we will be able to open our doors and welcome you all back to the gallery, while observing all necessary safety protocols and helping to maintain the highest standards of public health. We hope to see you soon!
