Miville

Miville paints both abstraction and portraiture, in a diametrically opposed treatment. Contradictory, but nevertheless speaking to each other, in the end, in a totally complementary way.

His abstract work mainly explores two movements from the middle of the 20th century, namely action painting and minimalism. His plastic influences are from the same period. The balance of power versus weightlessness is at the heart of his approach.

The investment of the body is total when she paints; her gestures are visceral, anchored, whole and fiery, even almost brutal. She visualizes in a meditative way and launches intuitively in the same breath, not by automatism. The result is refined and aesthetic, without completely covering the raw cotton canvas, in weightlessness.

Inspired by architecture, both organic and urban; mass and volume rub shoulders with balance, lines and light in her works. The architectural structure leads her to go beyond her already circular natural movement. The spatial composition is, for Miville, the breathing of the painting. Her canvases are mounted on false frames once painted, which will allow her to play with shapes and space. She composes her palette of acrylic pigments, mixes her own colors, however black and white are omnipresent in her work.

Miville invites the viewer to invest her painting in order to give it meaning and appropriate its history. She thereby defines her definition of beauty which only appears through the feeling and the history evoked in the viewer through her pictorial work. According to her, minimalism influences our daily well-being.

"The reason for this lies in a certain psychology of knowledge. When it comes to beauty, which is a modality of the absolute, we always begin by feeling what we think; we only really understand what we have first grasped through feeling."

Utility of beauty - philosophical prose, Victor Hugo

The character and his psychology inhabit Miville, she is greatly inspired by German expressionism; its subjective aspect and its instinctive functioning.

Through portraiture, she develops the notion of identity and gender through a reflection that begins with photography. She draws a personal self-portrait from it, exaggerates and then transforms the physical features in pencil on the canvas, then stages herself in a solitary way. Her figures are framed in close-up chest in order to focus on the face and for the viewer to pay attention to the emotions and psychology of the characters. Interaction is paramount.

Situated in an abstract "No mans land", sometimes half-arrogant, half-jaded, inquisitorial or melancholic, her portraits, whose gaze most often falls on the viewer, seem to know more than he does. Miville cultivates the strange, sometimes disturbing. The deformation of the line animates her, she reinterprets the notion of beauty whose aestheticism varies according to the paintings.

Newly back in oil, graphite takes its place energetically through her brushstroke. She assumes a unique and bold color palette, from Japanese red aka to salmon, passing through all the tones of green. Miville translates in her own way, in the same momentum as the expressionists at the time, her anguish in the face of the world and society as she perceives it today.

Born in the Bas-du-Fleuve region, Miville (real name Jennifer Tremblay), who grew up and studied scenography at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique in Quebec City, is also a renowned costume designer in the Montreal television and theatre world. She has earned two Gémeaux nominations in the category: Best Costume Design, Fiction.

Miville has been practicing engraving for several years; his etching Genèse was acquired by the Bibliothèque des archives nationales du Québec (BanQ) and 2 of his abstract works are also part of MEMORIA's public art collection.

The artist has participated in several group exhibitions, including at the Centre national d'exposition de Jonquière (CNE) and the Foire d'art contemporaine de St-Lambert (FAC), as well as in the United States for Scope in NY and for the International art show Red Dot in Miami.