_Bio Andréanne le. Hudon has left the dust of the Turcot interchange and taken to the mountains of Charlevoix, where - feet in the earth, spade and brush in hand - she paints, draws and landscapes. Her work has traveled with her to Quebec, Canada and France. She observed caterpillars in Rouyn-Noranda while in residence at L'Écart - lieu d'art actuel, prepared a herbarium drawn from the flowerbeds of Montreal during a master's degree at UQAM, and, more recently, cultivates and roams the woods of her region thanks to the support of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts.
_Approach In the studio as in the garden, Anréanne le. Hudon is humble in her approach. She is continually questioning her own gaze on what we call nature, a gaze that combines both sensitive and Cartesian biases. Anréanne le. Hudon believes that the richness of perception lies in its quality of being both distorting and irremediably incomplete. As such, she strives to produce paintings that celebrate the limits and porosity of her all-too-human imagination.
In her paintings, the vegetation she observes undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming both mysterious and fascinating once again, and prompting the emergence of an underlying reality. Working in the realm of sensation, the artist believes that the fleeting nature of the sensory exhausts all overly fixed definitions. We are nature. And her paintings bear witness to the experience of what is, and which proliferates ⎼ beyond all control ⎼ in spite of oneself.
Thus are chimeras born.
_Project Andréanne le. Hudon follows on from her series Le Jardin (2020). The project begins with a wild collection of live plants. In the studio, this vegetation is then assembled into a composition, which will serve as a model for a large-scale painting.
The arrival of Andréanne le. Hudon in Charlevoix transformed not only her lifestyle and practice, but also her reflection on her relationship with the world. Her practice has extended outside the studio, to the garden and forest that make up the land she calls home. By exhibiting her creative process at the Symposium of Baie-Saint-Paul, the artist hopes to provoke discussion around the various issues she considers both in and out of the studio, and which are reflected in her paintings. Paintings and seeds will initiate an exchange on the themes of a sensitive relationship with the living, perception, humility, willpower and what it means to inhabit the world with the public.
