↳ Exhibitions

Jean-François Lauda and Brendan Flanagan at VIE D’ANGE

January 15, 2017

Artists: Jean-François Lauda and Brendan Flanagan

Venue: VIE D’ANGE, Montréal, Canada

Date: November 25 – December 31, 2016

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and VIE D’ANGE, Montréal

Vie D’ange is happy to present an exhibition of new work by Jean-François Lauda and Brendan Flanagan. Both painters arrive at abstraction through different approaches and concerns. Whether personal or technical, their individual processes deal with the transmission that occurs between fleeting layers of information, the space of malleable moments after they have hardened and concealed. Jean-François Lauda’s recent series of large canvases explore defamiliarizing his gestures through the deployment of collaborative tools. Mops, brooms and other household objects serve as elongated prosthetics that both extended his reach yet confuse his hand.

Brendan Flanagan’s work is also rooted in a concern of painting yet his output often takes form in installation. Preparing for this exhibition Flanagan began frequenting Lauda’s studio to sift through his archive of small paintings. He then began scanning Lauda’s work into 3D models before stretching and distorting them within software. Flanagan then outputted CNC cut foam board which provided molds for the paintings to be extruded and relieved in the studio as sculpted plaster. For Flanagan, processes and relationships become materials within an expanded painting practice. For this exhibition he has constructed a voluminous steel apparatus welded to the gallery’s architecture – a mimetic armature that supports his recent production. The armature allows Flanagan’s painting to experienced in the round, existing as slices or layers in space separated from walls yet connected through their shared support. Like Lauda’s large canvases, Flanagan’s mutations recall and evoke distance as tangential collaborative spaces that re-emerge through layers of de-familiarization.

Through an intuitive approach, Jean-François Lauda’s practice grapples with the exploration and disintegration of painting. Embracing the unexpected and seeking to understand the residual traces of the image, the artist’s research is characterized by gradual formal transformations as well as raw application of color. The artist’s practice evokes self-reflexive associations, whether through erased and fleeting gestures, juxtaposed geometric bands and fragmented or concealed elements, Lauda’s compositions reveal, in the interplay of their details, a constant desire to shift the susceptible elements of chance into a kind of aesthetics of finesse. Lauda has participated to the 30th Symposium d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2012, curated by Serge Murphy. He was also part of the Painting Project at Galerie de l’UQÀM in 2013 and Pimps and Fishmongers, a solo exhibition, was shown at VSVSVS, Toronto in 2013. His recent work was shown at Erin Stump Projects, Toronto in 2014, Battat Contemporary and Romer Young gallery in San Francisco, in 2015. His artworks are part of collections such as Hydro-Québec, TD bank and National bank of Canada. Lauda works and lives in Montreal.

A recent MFA graduate of Concordia University, Brendan Flanagan was awarded the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Fine Art in 2014. He was shortlisted for the RBC Painting Prize in 2013, with an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. Recent exhibitions include Preset Mispronounced and Surface Stratagem (both Division Gallery, Toronto). In the past his work has been written about in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Magenta Magazine, and Bad Day Magazine. He has exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Flanagan’s work explores the tools of digital design used to create the media, objects and architecture that surround us. Through a back and forth process of hand making and computer tweaking Flanagan attempts to concretize the areas where the digital inserts itself into creation. Flanagan is represented by Division Gallery, he works and lives between Toronto and Montréal.