David Blatherwick and Mario Côté
De la conversation en peinture : ÉCARTs et CORRESPONDANCEs
Opening : Saturday, April 18, from 2 p.m.
Artist talk / Meet the artists : Tuesday, April 21, from 6 p.m.
David Blatherwick is a visual artist whose practice currently focuses on painting and drawing. Having lived in various places (Quebec City, New York, Alberta, Ontario, the Dominican Republic, and Spain), he is primarily associated with the Montreal art scene. For over thirty years, his work has been regularly presented in galleries and institutions in Canada and abroad. He has received numerous grants and awards (Pollock-Krasner Award, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts), and his works are included in several institutional and private collections (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec). Formerly a professor at four Canadian universities, he is now retired and lives with his family in the coastal town of Les Palmères, in eastern Spain, where he continues his artistic practice.
Artist’s Instagram
Mario Côté, painter, documentary filmmaker on art, and creator of experimental videos, has, among other things, initiated several multidisciplinary projects. He is interested in encounters between artistic disciplines, as well as between the individuals who practice them. In recent years, he has explored the notion of intersemiotic translation in painting. In 2002, a retrospective of his pictorial and video work, curated by Nicole Gingras, was presented at the Musée d’art de Joliette. In 2015, he also took part in a major solo exhibition, Table d’écoute, at the Musée régional de Rimouski, curated by Patrice Loubier. Between 2018 and 2022, he transcribed one of composer Morton Feldman’s final graphic scores, Atlantis. He has published several texts on artists’ works and reflections on art. He taught at the Université du Québec à Montréal from 1989 to 2019 and is currently an associate professor and independent artist-researcher.
Artist’s website
De la conversation en peinture: ÉCARTs et CORRESPONDANCEs is the result of a collaboration between the artists David Blatherwick (Les Palmeres, Spain) and Mario Côté (Montréal, Québec). Although each presents his own works, the exhibition’s concept and parameters were studied, negotiated, and resolved together. From the beginning of their exchange, they challenged how paintings are conventionally exhibited. Paintings are produced in the studio, but the gallery is where they are displayed to extend their exploration. David Blatherwick and Mario Côté wanted to highlight the idea of exposing the creative process and simultaneously to emphasize the ephemeral nature of the hanging of works.
Different visual relationships are deployed. Presented according to a principle of variable combinations, one artist’s works are placed close to the other’s, suggesting intimacy. Charcoal drawings, traces of colour on Kraft paper, and photo montages provide a guide to the daily process of creation. A fresco accompanies a frieze of small paintings, whose sky blues evoke a space of introspection. And so, as a group, the works enter into dialogue, like a conversation from which a real friendship emerges.
Although David Blatherwick and Mario Côté situate themselves within different approaches to abstract painting, they discovered, to their surprise, more correspondences than differences in their work. The question of the role of bodies and abstract signs as triggering elements draw their attention. David Blatherwick is interested in the body as a generator of shapes and movements, which is the driving force behind his works, in which he uses close-ups of his drawings from the model. Fascinated by the symbiosis that operates between musicians and their instruments, Mario Côté folds and unfolds the pictorial plane and musical symbols to bring out the energy of a possible body-instrument.
In their abstractions, surfaces are transformed into colourful planes, opacities into transparencies, juxtaposition into superimposition, geometric or organic shapes into bright or earthy colours. Figuration is metamorphosed. Sprinkled with delicate, subtle signs, the paintings are punctuated with sets of lines and sharp shapes that evoke, in turn, interweaving patterns and articulations; notes, clefs, and staves; and folds and shadows. Here and there, elements offer clues.
— Joannie Boulais
Translated by Käthe Roth
Opening : Saturday, April 18, from 2 p.m.
Artist talk / Meet the artists : Tuesday, April 21, from 6 p.m.
David Blatherwick is a visual artist whose practice currently focuses on painting and drawing. Having lived in various places (Quebec City, New York, Alberta, Ontario, the Dominican Republic, and Spain), he is primarily associated with the Montreal art scene. For over thirty years, his work has been regularly presented in galleries and institutions in Canada and abroad. He has received numerous grants and awards (Pollock-Krasner Award, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts), and his works are included in several institutional and private collections (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec). Formerly a professor at four Canadian universities, he is now retired and lives with his family in the coastal town of Les Palmères, in eastern Spain, where he continues his artistic practice.
Artist’s Instagram
Mario Côté, painter, documentary filmmaker on art, and creator of experimental videos, has, among other things, initiated several multidisciplinary projects. He is interested in encounters between artistic disciplines, as well as between the individuals who practice them. In recent years, he has explored the notion of intersemiotic translation in painting. In 2002, a retrospective of his pictorial and video work, curated by Nicole Gingras, was presented at the Musée d’art de Joliette. In 2015, he also took part in a major solo exhibition, Table d’écoute, at the Musée régional de Rimouski, curated by Patrice Loubier. Between 2018 and 2022, he transcribed one of composer Morton Feldman’s final graphic scores, Atlantis. He has published several texts on artists’ works and reflections on art. He taught at the Université du Québec à Montréal from 1989 to 2019 and is currently an associate professor and independent artist-researcher.
Artist’s website