BIO Richard Cloutier holds bachelor’s degrees in architecture and visual arts and a master’s degree in visual arts (2006) from Université Laval. He was one of the founding partners of Les Ateliers du Trois Cinquième. His work has been exhibited in Canada and the United States. Four of his paintings have been acquired by Loto-Québec for its collection.
APPROACH For the past twenty years, Richard Cloutier has devoted himself to exploring painting by revisiting geometric abstraction through the prism of his work as an architect. Several successive layers are placed on a primary structure to construct the surface, like a vibrating material. In a play of improvised interventions, this work of superimposition contradicts or underscores, reinforces or negates, swallows up or reactivates what lies beneath it. Between what is built and what arises, between intention and accident, the artist has the opportunity to bring opposites face to face and to introduce duality, even a dialectic. For Cloutier, the world is read in planes and cross sections, in axonometry and perspectives. Our constructions generate memory and we all carry within us the spaces we inhabit.
PROJECT The project consists of large-format paintings assembled in the form of an installation, part way between painting and inhabited architecture. The works will suggest chromatic atmospheres, structural main elements, recurring motifs and many-layered surface patinas created through construction techniques such as sanding, scraping, varnishing and nailing. Treated as both pictorial abstractions and architectural fragments, the works will be inspired by buildings associated with the everyday labour and the agriculture of Baie-Saint-Paul. From the perspective of a critical confrontation between theoretical preservation directives and the affective reality of the owners of these buildings, the artist wishes to bring together their family history, the pleasures and constraints associated with the occupation, and the maintenance of this built heritage.
