Visit at the Musée d'Art Contemporain

3 influential works

1-
Sylvie Bouchard, La partie quarrée, 1995.
Oil on canvas mounted on board

I think that this painting is full of contradictions. First because of the title is «la partie carrée » but the canvas is circular. I like titles, especially when they create dialogue for the viewer of the peice.

Then there is a man in the center and he looks very surprised or facinated by something, but we do not see what he is looking at. My question is : Is he looking at the viewer (which is in the «real world») or at something else in the universe of the painting that is between the viewer and this character or behind the viewer? This relates to my idea of being stuck behind a computer screen and remote from the world.

Finally the use of colors is the point that I like most of this painting. The artist acheives confusion of the notions of light primaries and pigment primaries in the painting. Knowing that paint normally reacts to pigment primaries, it is facinating to see how the color-mixes give the impression that it is colored light that is applied on the canvas. This relates to my project because I want to play with colored light and the effect that light primaries have on each other in the real world.

The 3 (printing or pigment) primaries merge into one another without being mixed and becomming secondary colors. I think that this is because the colored pigments are juxtaposed (on a small scale) instead of being mixed to attain the in-between colors. The result is a very luminous and ambiguous color effect.

The illustration that I made is successful in showing how her colors worked in the juctions of blue/ yellow and yellow / red that don’t turn into secondaries, but not in the red / blue area in which becomes purple.