Patrice Charbonneau

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

A graduate in architecture, the artist is interested in the way individuals represent space, how they inhabit it and orient themselves in it. Because space is never experienced as 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 truly human space in which the artist is interested. Sometimes, in that it is marked by an event charged with emotion; sometimes, in its banality, a 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 internalized, essentially symbolic space that the artist represents is opposed to 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 allows us to guess the artist's gesture and allows us to imagine the material elaboration, from the bare support, of the painted image. The paint thickens in places to the point of giving a third dimension to the image, as if the painter was using it to literally construct in the material the space he is exploring; elsewhere, it flows, liquid, pulled by gravity. This rich language is clearly articulated and results from precise execution, simple, effective gestures which directly serve its purpose.

Text by Bruno Mainville

Professor of literature, writer, painter