Maternity is not the subject of Isabelle Guimond’s recent paintings. However, it hovers implicitly, like a light veil deposited on the oils and acrylics of the exhibition. This glow in which I pour myself outhis first in four years at the Simon Blais gallery.
No baby portrait, no breastfeeding session, no toys on the ground… No motif echoes the artist’s new reality. Barely a title (Postpartum) the murmur. The composition, the clearest and most realistic of the entire exhibition, details the stems of a plant and the shadows, a scene made possible by a curtain left ajar.
Isabelle Guimond paints her daily life, both her horizon, limited by the walls of the house, and the time spent with her daughter. In a video posted online by the gallery, she confides having experienced a “temporal and bodily” split during breastfeeding, between the state of symbiosis with the child and the evasive spirit, thinking about painting.
Each artist adapts to motherhood (or fatherhood) in their own way. Mothers often give up their practice, or put it on hold for a while. Or take the kids with them, like Justine Kurland, a New York photographer who has taken a book of her road trips with her boy. Isabelle Guimond, she took a turn.
For ten years, his paintings have been based on social and urban observations, without fear of representing dark realities, such as the violence suffered by women. The co-founder of the Girls Debouttes collective! even found a way, during COVID-19, to work with Carolyne Scenna — the exhibition The Dormitory Phenomenon. In 2022, her immobility as a mother forced her into domestic and intimate themes, but leaving her reality as a mother “offscreen”, as she expresses it in the video.
The turn will not have been brutal. His touch, again, lingers on details, fragments the space, favors close-ups. The figure remains present, although this time under the features of its face and its immediate environment, in particular flowers.
The exhibition alternates the variants of what the domestic glow, sunny or foggy, inspired him. The paintings Snapself-portraits marked by fatigue, rub shoulders with the three paintings Bedroom, three times of the same sight. Echoing the monotony that has taken over, the motifs repeat themselves, change a little, arise inside restricted surfaces — the shadow of a window, a mirror, a screen…
Highlight of the exhibition, presented behind, The breath brings together five oils in shades ranging from pink to purplish, which reveal under the agitation of a curtain the passing of time, dying flowers. This glow in which I pour myself out, with its still lifes, interiors and self-portraits, offers a commentary on the history of painting, a history that has for too long excluded women, mothers or not, condemned to represent their world between four walls. Isabelle Guimond assumes her condition by enriching it with sincere and meaningful painting.