_Bio Born in 1989, Josiane Lanthier holds a bachelor’s degree in visual and media art from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her work, consisting mostly of landscape paintings, is represented by the Champagne et Paradis gallery in Kamouraska and by the Simon Blais gallery in Montreal. Several of her works are found in private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe.
_Approach For more than a decade, Josiane Lanthier has developed an artistic practice focused essentially on painting, onto which she sometimes grafts other techniques, such as sewing and embroidery. Driven by an insatiable curiosity about colour, she explores its treatment in contemporary painting, its functions, and the energy and sense of vivacity that arise from the marriage of certain hues.
Her paintings, whether by their treatment of light, their superimposition of different textures and materials or the occasional emergence of ghostly silhouettes, lend a dreamy quality and a touch of poetry to the scenes they depict, thereby interrogating our usual perception of the land. With her colourful, rich and profuse worlds, Lanthier seeks to provide viewers with a multisensory experience.
_Project Out of a series of encounters with visitors to the symposium, Josiane Lanthier will paint a multitude of micro-portraits. Showing a part of the bodies chosen by the persons questioned, these small paintings will be sewn together at the end of each week to assemble a large tableau taking the form of a quilt. The four quilts created over the course of the event, veritable mosaics of individual bodies, will make up new social bodies, symbols of the cohesion of an unsuspected community. This collective artwork will thereby provide a kind of portrait of society, a metaphorical depiction of an “us” which, after having permeated the artist’s painting, will form a renewed social fabric.
Photo credits : Eva-Maude TC
