ANNE BERTOIN AND RON EADY, TRAP / ELUSION, OCTOBER 1 – 26, 2008, OPENING RECEPTION, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2008, 6-9 PM
From October 1 to October 26, Craig Scott Gallery presents a two-person show of new work by Anne Bertoin and Ron Eady, Trap / Elusion. The show is conceived as a dialogue between two artists whose sensibilities and styles of painting (Eady in encaustic and Bertoin in vinylique) share significant commonalities but whose conceptual thematics have different centres of gravity (even as both cross over into the fields of psychology and psychiatry as attested to by academic articles on each artist from scholars in those fields). One artist has chosen the title Trap for the artist’s contributions to the exhibition while the other artist has chosen Elusion. The viewer is invited to explore the nature of the line separating the works in Trap / Elusion.
ANNE BERTOIN, TRAP/
Anne Bertoin was born in Lyon, France. From a very young age she found herself interested in drawing and took courses put on by the city. In 1982, she left Lyon for Paris after being accepted in the École Nationale de Beaux-Arts, where she specialized in painting over the four years she attended Beaux-Arts. Not long after graduating from Beaux-Arts, she came to Canada in 1988. In Montréal, she pursued a bachelor of studio arts at Concordia University in order to study sculpture and also in order to familiarize herself with a more contemporary approach to art. A special influence on Bertoin’s work was the teaching of Crémonini at Beaux-Arts. Bertoin recalled that Cremonini, “passing from abstract to figurative work, was employing chance in painting in order to call up the subconscious.” Writing about her own work in 1995, she comments, “[T]he spaces [in my paintings] are constructed on the basis of memory and by chance and not according to photographs.” Art critics in Québec have in effect noted the influence of these elements, in commenting on how Bertoin’s own paintings emerge, for the artist, from a process suspended between the conscious and subconscious and, for the viewer, as a work that pulses with uncertain origins and unresolved narratives.
Anne Bertoin showed at Craig Scott Gallery in January 2007 with her Fractured Visions works, consisting of both paintings and sculptures. Gary Michael Dault wrote on both media in two separate reviews of the show. Of Bertoin’s painting, he wrote in the Globe and Mail of her “dizzying”, “persistent, venerable, and disturbing,” and “stupendous” paintings In his weekly “Walking the Line” column for Artinfo.com, he later again commented on her painting as “majestic” and “euphorically apocalyptic.”
Recent important articles on Bertoin’s work have included:
• Pierre Gaudriault and Aurore Cartier, "Anne Bertoin ou l'auscultation du désastre," (2006) 71 L'evolution psychiatrique 782-786
• Bernard Lévy, “Les espace dévastés d’Anne Bertoin,” automne 2004, no. 196, Vie des arts, pp. 46-49
RON EADY, /ELUSION
For Ron Eady, encaustic painting is a medium that permits him to carve out subjects and images from deep within his soul, resulting in unique and powerful works. His compelling canvases fascinate viewers even as they very often also disturb. Rich in ambiguity, his work triggers within viewers constantly changing emotions and reflections.
Of his approach to his work, Eady writes, "I work the surface through a repeated process of painting, burning and scraping, allowing the work to evolve, and lead me in new directions, until it feels complete." His technical mastery of encaustic painting includes employment in some of his works of a signature cross-hatching method (what Eady calls a "line work" weave) that grows out of training and earlier work in drawing. Eady is now exhibiting internationally, including, since 2004, in Los Angeles, Japan, the Netherlands, and, as of April 2006, with Opera Gallery in New York City. In 2000, Eady became an elected member of The Ontario Society of Artists (O.S.A.).
Following his November 2006 Stages of Mind exhibition at Craig Scott Gallery, Eady had a very successful show with Galerie d’Avignon in Montreal. The Montreal Gazette devoted a full-page review essay to the show. In 2005, Stir Magazine devoted a four-page interview to Eady: “Exposing Layers: Interview by Birgit Moenke”, Stir Magazine, Edition 10 (Globe & Mail supplement for subscribers of the newspaper), October 2005.
Eady’s work, like Bertoin’s has also attracted interdisciplinary critical commentary from the world of psychiatry and psychology. The following extract is from University of Toronto Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, John M. Kennedy, “Metaphor and Art” in R. W. Gibbs (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, forthcoming):
Eady’s pictures have incomplete buildings, mounds of twigs, dark blue water, dense forest, shadowy figures glimpsed through windows, and mirrors reflecting impassive faces over taps and washbasins. They are sinister and compelling at first glance. Eady’s pictures conjure metaphor from objects, geometries, lines and contours. Indeed, as will become clear, art’s devices cut broadly across cognition and the senses, in ways likely to be remarkably universal…...
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