D'abord saisir Painting

Born in 1947 in Quebec, Canada. Studied in Qubec, in France and in London UK. Recipient of grants in visual arts, board member for several groups of artists over the years, took part in many juries and committees, as a visual art specialist. Teached art while engaged in a carreer as a painter and sculptor and photographer. Her work is part of many important collections in her country and abroad and got favorable critics from many art specialists in the press and specialised art magazines. See website :

"Chroniques et fragments" presents two components. We first have enhanced photographs, sites photographed while roaming about the streets of ancient cities. We see old tapestries, colors, matters, thickenings, holes, brokens parts, etc. Those photographs have been enhanced with drawing and collage, texts, imprints, as to keep them alive and make those public and urban elements more intimate. By their construction and mood as well as by their colors and textures, those photographs have inspired the corpus of paintings of this new production.
In these paintings, the artist inertwine her own life story by choosins among previous artwork or clippings, fragments of kept images that she conceals, passages of texts about creation. The fragments do not show directly what they matter about, they disclose as much as they conceal, they hide and reveal. Some excerpts from the texts on creation inserted in the painting become the titles.

This new serie "Chronique et fragments" is treated like "palimpseste". Layer by layer, color, matters and materials are set down. The artist covers up, scratches, glues, and starts over again and again, accumulating materials, piling up, creating new constructions while keeping traces of the old ones. The components meet, unite, compose and reconstruct in a new whole.

Odette Thberge's work speaks of the ephemeral side of our existence, of another reality, the one of our inner life, of our recollections, of all the layers with which we are created who mark our faces and bodies in a real way. There is throughout her work a desire to show the passage of time on persons and things.