Basics #12 Painting

I started the Basic Suite in 2020 once Studio BRW was established in Montreal, during the pandemic. After a last series on canvases painted in Paris which was one of the most figurative, I wanted and needed to try a return to the sources and remembered that we have been defining, for more than 600 years now (100 years after Giotto approximately), painting as being the art of associating shapes and colors. Simple, pragmatic, universal definition. In short: basic. Whether we admire Guernica, Las Meninas, The Mona Lisa, A Bigger Splash, Pope Innocent X, we admire one and the same thing: shapes and colors. I also remembered that Man, before painting on canvas, painted on wood. I finally wondered about the simplest form that I had at my disposal and I therefore considered the point, a surface being a set of juxtaposed points. This research, this working framework, allowed me to free myself from any desire for representation and to return to the brutal (because mechanical) gesture of reproducing the form with an economy of means and tools bordering on asceticism. The direction of presentation of the tables may vary. The series is currently a work in progress. The wood is Russian cherry plywood mounted on a basswood frame. The paint is acrylic. A finish is carried out to protect the painted surfaces.