Oiseau (Glum)

A dozen works sculpted onto plywood with superimposed and painted layers constitute the body of work of this “sculptor of drawings”, who, as an attentive observer of his environment and everyday life, chronicles the invisible and relates in his paintings, as well as in his journal, a series of stories that tell a story. 

In this exhibition, Denis Prieur explores the effect created when a sudden distance in human relations occurs as well as the whole range of feelings and emotions that this new melancholic state of waiting evokes. To illustrate this instability and this new dynamic, he has chosen the bird, a fragile and nomadic subject, and the mountains, incongruous in the Prairies, but solid and static. Impregnated with this duality, or paradox, each painting is a discovery and can be read on a number of levels that the artist, in a surreptitious way, using humour and modesty, invites us to decipher. Paper birds that jump over mountains, mountains that move around in trucks: it is love and much more! Even the title of the exhibition, which can be interpreted in a number of different ways, lends a tone to the experience that awaits us. 

A graduate of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba, working in the tradition of artists such as Paterson Ewen and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Denis Prieur has nonetheless developed his own playful style. In the exhibition Oiseau (Glum) which marks an evolution in his work, the artist reveals his secret codes, bit by bit, to give himself over whole-heartedly in the end and touch us profoundly.