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 explores mainly 2 currents of the middle of the 20th century, namely action painting and minimalism. His plastic influences are from the same period. The relationship of force 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 intuitively rushes forward in the same breath, not by automatism. The result is pure and aesthetic, without completely covering the raw cotton canvas, weightless.

Inspired by architecture, both organic and urban, mass and volume rub shoulders with balance, line and light in her work. The architectural structure brings her out of her already circular natural movement. The spatial composition is, for Miville, the breath of the painting. Her canvases are mounted on false frames once painted, which allows her to play with shapes and space. She composes her palette of acrylic pigments, mixing 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 to appropriate its history. She defines beauty as the feeling and story evoked in the viewer through her work. According to her, minimalism influences our daily well-being.

"The reason for this is 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 the beautiful - philosophical prose, Victor Hugo

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

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

Situated in an abstract "No Mans Land", sometimes half arrogant, half blasé, inquisitive or melancholic, his portraits, whose gaze is most often on the viewer, seem to know more than he does. Miville cultivates the strange, sometimes disturbing. The distortion of the line animates her, she reinterprets the notion of beauty whose aestheticism varies according to the paintings.

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

BIO

Born in the Bas-du-Fleuve, Miville (real name Jennifer Tremblay), who grew up and studied stage design at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique in Quebec City, is also a renowned costume designer in the Montreal television and theater community. She has received two Gemini nominations for Best Costume Design in Fiction.

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

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