Patrice Charbonneau

Space is the dominant theme in Patrice Charbonneau's painting. At the start of each work, an architecture of lines and planes sketches the fiction of a place, a square, a landscape or an interior.

A graduate in architecture, the artist is interested in how individuals represent space, how they inhabit it and orient themselves in it. Because space is never experienced as being uniform and undifferentiated, it is marked by culture, habits and experiences. Everyone has a personal topography, invisible to others and often unconscious. It is this specifically human space in which the artist is interested. Sometimes, in that it is marked by an emotionally charged event; sometimes, in its banality, place of the ordinary, of the everyday. Always, it is a question of an inhabited space, as also a narration underlies the fabric of the marks left on the surface by the artist.

The interiorized space, essentially symbolic that the artist represents, is opposed by the concrete materiality of the work, underlined by the way in which the possibilities of the paste are exploited. Sometimes opaque, sometimes transparent, thin or thick, it reveals the artist's gesture and allows us to imagine the material elaboration, from the bare support, of the painted image. The paint in places thickens to the point of giving a third dimension to the image, as if the painter were using it to literally construct the space he explores in matter; elsewhere, it flows, liquid, pulled by gravity. This rich language is articulated clearly and results from a precise execution, from a simple, effective gesture which directly serves its purpose.

Text by Bruno Mainville

Literature teacher, writer, painter