Pierre Dorion at Zalucky Contemporary

Artist: Pierre Dorion

Exhibition title: Seuils

Venue: Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, Canada

Date: March 14 – April 18, 2020

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

Zalucky Contemporary is pleased to present new work by Montréal-based artist Pierre Dorion. For nearly four decades, Dorion’s nationally-renown practice has explored the intersection between painting, architecture and photography. His highly-polished technique of depicting interior spaces parred down to their most elemental features have become his trademark.

Dorion works from photographs he has taken of urban buildings, apartments, galleries and museums. In this way, his work can be read as photographic notations of his personal wanderings. With a camera in hand, the artist focuses his lens on architectural features others would easily dismiss as rudimentary or banal. Not Dorion, however, for his paintings later reveal what a casual glance cannot – the subtle beauty of stark geometric forms and how the simple interplay of light and shadow can define the contours of a space.

In a 2012 retrospective of Dorion’s work at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM), curator Mark Lanctôt summarized his practice:

From the very beginning of his career, Pierre Dorion has had a strong interest in art history, and he attracted early critical attention with installation work that took an analytical look at the styles and subject matter of classical painting. Then, after producing a series of large-scale self-portraits in the 1990s, his gaze turned to architectural and other manufactured spaces, and gradually he developed a more graphic style of working that resulted in his paintings becoming increasingly spare, ultimately achieving a kind of figurative Minimalism. Unmediated by inflection and painterly gesture, Dorion’s depiction of the specific locations selected and framed in his initial photographs confound the viewer’s sense of scale and perspective. Through his careful use of close detail and flat viewpoints, the walls, corners, and features (such as doors, windows, ledges) of his ‘scenes’ become pure fields of line, color, and shading: the formal elements of Abstraction.

Born in Ottawa, where he received his BFA from the University of Ottawa in 1981, Pierre Dorion now lives and works in Montréal. Over the last thirty years, he has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions and taken part in a number of major art events such as Aurora Borealis in 1985, the 1992 edition of Cent jours d’art contemporain de Montréal and a touring exhibition in 1995 organized by the Art Gallery of York University curated by Catherine Crowston. In 1997, he received the Prix Louis-Comtois awarded by the City of Montréal in collaboration with AGAC (Contemporary Art Galleries Association). Dorion was the subject of a solo exhibition at Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal in 2010, and in 2012 the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presented a retrospective of his work curated by Marc Lanctôt, which travelled to the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax. His works are held in the collections of major Canadian museums, among them the National Gallery of Canada, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. He is represented by Galerie René Blouin in Montréal and Jack Shainman Gallery, in New York.