L’ART S’AFFICHE x Technopôle Angus
Discover the stimulating series “Corps recouverts” by artist Rosalie Gamache, on the fence surrounding the Place Michel Hébert construction site, at the corner of Molson and William-Tremblay streets.
L’art s’affiche is a public display project, with the objective of making contemporary art accessible while visually energizing the urban space. Emerging and established artists, from multiple practices, are selected and invited to exhibit their works in an unexpected environment.
Rosalie Gamache
Biography
Rosalie Gamache is an artist born in 1993 who lives and works in Montreal. She graduated from Université Laval in 2018 with a BFA, which she completed with a semester-long exchange at the École des beaux-arts de Marseille in 2017. Before her university education, she developed unique expertise in historical materials and techniques of drawing and painting through professional practice in portraiture and a year of studies at the Florence Classical Art Academy in Italy.
Artistic approach
Her recent production of oil paintings, notably her “Corps recouverts” series, revisits the historical codes of the nude from a contemporary queer perspective. Drawing on both the technical and iconographic traditions of painting, her artworks represent bodies covered with a thick layer of fluid matter. Along with evoking their own medium in a self-referential manner, consistent with an earlier series entitled “Peintures blanches”, these works blur the interpretation of bodily forms and sexual markers, thus creating a space for critical reflection on identity.
The series:
Corps recouverts
Rosalie Gamache’s Corps recouverts series opens onto a pictorial universe where formlessness and realism unite. Revisiting the historical codes of the nude from a queer perspective, the artist depicts bodies concealed by a white material that evokes paint. Stereotypical representations of subjects and gender are erased in favor of a new imagery of intersubjective relationships, expressed in touch, fluidity and intertwining. In her pictorial material, the boundaries between bodies are blurred, identities oscillate; the artist proposes a staging of intimacy where the sensuality of painting meets that of emotional bonds.
Rosalie Gamache’s practice is marked by a sensitive exploitation of the painting tradition. Fascinated by the phenomena of illusion, transparency and metamorphosis, she creates works with a smooth texture, playing on fine chromatic nuances. Accuracy of representation rubs shoulders with the impossibility of recognizing what is depicted, and the masterful execution of her works serves the undecidable, even the formless. Trained in Florence in the academic tradition and at Laval University in contemporary art, she links these two approaches in her practice, reappropriating classical techniques in a feminist posture, in order to exploit their aesthetic potential while operating a reversal of value in terms of representation.
