Robertson Ares Gallery | François Vincent, fertile and inspired

The Robertson Arès gallery offered the painter and engraver François Vincent to present the fruit of his work generated during the pandemic. This gives Promised landa dazzling corpus of mastery and depth.

Eric Clement
The Press

The refined path of François Vincent in this delicate artistic space that he has built for himself over the past thirty years continues. Coming out of his exhibition, we said to ourselves, with the photographer colleague, how much the works of this artist fulfill the expectations of our quests for beauty and appeasement. They reflect the state of mind and the resilience that inhabited us during the painful confinements of the pandemic, a period that will have been very fruitful for François Vincent.

An artist in his early sixties, he has enjoyed himself for the past two years. And his precision work makes us once again mistake bladders for lanterns, or paintings for sculptures! Promised land is made of assemblages of colored spheres reminiscent of childhood balls, original clothing buttons or Harlequin doorknobs. A virtuoso of illusion, François Vincent masters the materialization of the immaterial so well (nuances, shades and touches of light) that, from a distance, we think we are dealing with objects of mother-of-pearl, wood or leather and not circles painted on canvas.

The Montreal artist has a way of painting that illustrates his fascination with the third dimension. We are in front of his canvases and we tend to want to stretch out our arm to touch these multicolored pellets and penetrate their center to get lost in the landscapes they introduce with effects reminiscent of the focusing of a camera. Souvenir landscapes, sometimes nostalgic, which provided titles for the works: The sand of the red mountains, Trails, The chain of Monts Silenceetc.

To develop his strange and symbolic paintings, François Vincent begins, as a good draftsman, by filling his notebooks with a myriad of sketches in black and white or in pastel shades. Notebooks which are, themselves, little jewels of art. Then the idea arose, this time, for Promised landtime, space and play.

By examining these small spheres that we believe to be polished and which turn out to be very dull, we find a whole narrative. A horizon line, a blue cube, a geography. References that make them objects of memory, of philosophical reflections. As if they were transformed into pocket watches that would give precise times of the past, revealing significant moments in life.

In front of these works, by alternating the distance of the glance, it is difficult to grasp how the artist manages to make his successive brushstrokes imperceptible from afar. And tangible this double effect of a 3D vision and an infinite depth. With an unheard-of sense of light, resulting, one suspects, from the experience of “knowing how to see”, this basis of the visual arts, which is learned less than it is acquired. Thanks to a sensitive, diligent, meticulous gaze that grants a great richness of expression.

Added to this is François Vincent’s fascination with polychromy. His game of painting renderings that seeks the harmonious harmony between gouache, gesso and oil paint. And his hard work canvas backgrounds. This concern for precision is all the same combined with a welcome fantasy that one discerns when one notes that the shadows vary from one “object” to another, each being bathed in its own sun. And then, in this artist, there is, at the base, a taste for monastic, contemplative work. A sort of dynamic asceticism. Small gestures and slowness, in the silence of his studio in Villeray. A leisurely approach à la Giorgio Morandi.

The exhibition includes three prints, etchings and aquatints that François Vincent exhibited last year at the R3 gallery in Trois-Rivières, as part of the 12^and International Biennial of Contemporary Prints. And which remind us that the painter is also a pioneer in this field and a devotee of the Circular Workshop and of the precious world of Quebec engraving.

The Robertson Arès gallery, specializing in avant-garde contemporary art, took on a challenge by inviting, before the pandemic, François Vincent for a solo within its walls. Emily Robertson had wanted to since the painter’s exhibition at the Orange gallery in 2009. “I told myself that one day we would work together,” she says.

This association makes sense. François Vincent is a hybrid, both classic and contemporary, which generates current works that intrigue, ignite, enrich the mind. The meeting of a gallery and an artist is as essential as that between his works and the visitors. They both open the paths necessary for this art so salutary when it emanates from fertile and inspired soil.

Until May 6 at the gallery at 1490 Sherbrooke Street West, in Montreal.