Véronique Chagnon-Côté at Zalucky Contemporary

Artist: Véronique Chagnon-Côté

Exhibition title: Méandre

Venue: Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, Canada

Date: June 11 – August 6, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Zalucky Contemporary

Earlier works by Véronique Chagnon-Côté presented surreal environments dominated by modernist structures. In her latest suite of paintings, it has become increasingly difficult to decipher where architecture ends and nature begins.

The works in Méandre explore the cultivation of gardens as well as the construction of space through paint. Gardens are enclosed (often private) spaces where presentation, arrangement and beauty are paramount. The architectonic gardens in Chagnon-Côté’s paintings unsettle these expectations through shifting planes, elevations and perspectives. Certain works, like Parterre II, evoke historical structures (the Pantheon, Rome) through geometric patterns that work towards organizing the natural elements. Any sense of internal logic or ‘order’ is undermined, however, by perspective which appears in constant contradiction: up appears down, inside alternates with outside and yet perspective still roots the work in the representational—for without it, the scene would dissolve entirely into the abstract.

Véronique Chagnon-Côté (b.1986) is a Montreal-based artist who recently graduated from Concordia University with an MFA (2016). Recent exhibitions include Vous êtes ici at CIRCA art actuel (Montreal), Ignition 9 at Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery (Montreal) and Espaces incertains at Galerie B-312, (Montreal). In 2009 she was the Quebec finalist for the BMO 1st Art! Invitational Competition presented at MOCCA (Toronto). Her work is found in numerous private and public collections, including the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Québec. Chagnon-Côté will be included in an upcoming group exhibition at Articule, Montreal in 2017.