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LAVOIE Chantal
: Print biography
The heart has its reasons, as does the body… At least, this is what enters the mind of the viewer when confronted with Chantal Lavoie’s work. The body has its reasons for aging and its reasons for dying. And if the fatality of our physical life is completely non-negotiable, what does that say about the rest of our existence. What about everything that happens between the time of our birth and the time of our demise? It is certain that there will be a plenitude of transformations between these two poles. In fact, each and every one of our cells carries a few seconds of our lives, the dramas, the tragedies, and the happy moments, big or small. Most of all, they carry life… our lives from their most mundane states to their greatest moments.
This is essentially painter Chantal Lavoie’s artistic concept. “The creative process which leads an artist to make a work of art constitutes the greatest of risks because creativity is a gamble. It is not as much the risk of making a mistake that is at issue, but rather the risk of not being accurate, of not being in tune with oneself, and thus with one’s subject. To create is therefore to trust oneself because, in this universe of creativity, one treads lightly, one moves forward step by step, if one moves forward at all… My creative process is a dark path, at times bumpy and riddled with sombre and deformed areas that I must reappropriate, reformulate into a new language. This language is the painter’s idiom, a universe that is strongly suggestive and ultimately animated by a rhythm, a movement, which is forever bound by two worlds: mine and the world of art. It is a nascent creature, a strange embryo that links the past, the present, and the future. Creation is a complex phenomenon. Its concept is simple, but its realization is infinitely more complicated than one could ever have anticipated. From caution and fear breeds happiness, an attraction to that which is forbidden, to raw pleasure… I journey through these stages with ardour, spirited by an indefinable force.”
It is in this way that Chantal Lavoie describes the essence of her pictorial approach, before adding: “Determination characterizes the next step in the creative process, a place where I refer to my academic and technical training. The composition is shaped, and sometimes misshaped, according to my aesthetic requirements while still keeping close ties to the present. I would define my approach as being rather classical. In the beginning, I work with charcoal. I am ‘fuelled’ by this medium. With it, I distort the relentless reality of what our bodies have lived. These bodies leave their mark on the surface of the canvas or at times disappear without a trace to leave room for another entity to take its place, just as in life.
Chantal Lavoie’s art is inscribed within the movement of contemporary creation through a multitude of influences and inspirations. The most important of these is undoubtedly classicism, most readily seen though the way that the artist composes her subject, through the importance of drawing, and through the fluidity of shapes. However, to box an artist like Chantal Lavoie within the confines of one category would be a mistake. Her playful spirit, her sensitivity, and the very nature of her subject, the journey of life, cannot stem from a single mould. Her pictorial expression is born from the present, even if her roots are deeply grounded in history. Dramatic, and sometimes tragic, are these bodies mortified and murdered by life? Obviously, this is sometimes the case. But there is also the jubilation, the eroticism, the ardent desire of bodies invigorated by love. Without a doubt, Chantal Lavoie’s art deserves all of our contemplation and consideration.
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