The Young Girls Won\u2019t Hear About It<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

From the world\u2019s constant flow of recycled images, Gabrielle Lajoie-Bergeron catches details with her brush. She carefully notes the relief of a derelict house, some twisted floral motifs, animal coats, local or exotic foliage. Wild colours, bursting brushstrokes, and emotive distortions sound out a familiar tune that touches the viewer directly. Her painting cultivates our sensory knowledge while generating our empathy for the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In these paintings, Lajoie-Bergeron pays careful attention to the women\u2019s protest movement. The uprising. Now, borne by the winds of awareness, the gesture travels along broken lines or the delineations of a messy head of hair. She\u2019s meticulous in drawing the contours of her subject: a young girl in flowers, Femen with bared breasts, an inflatable doll, a hooker in her garb, a cowgirl. She\u2019s more rebel than wise when proffering these bodies to the wolves, and raw in her descriptions when depicting intimate scenes. Her painting may well be deemed theatrical\u200a\u2014\u200athat nemesis of the modernist formalism of the 1960s\u200a\u2014\u200aas reality and fiction silently merge to test the limits of our tolerance. She responds to the depressions and traumas of our age with images that are still more crazed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To showcase her latest collections, Lajoie-Bergeron sets up improbable paths through the spatial disposition of her exhibitions. Do her casual arrangements allow us to imagine new ways of circulating among the objects? In her paintings, the half-mixed, glistening pools seduce the viewer\u2019s gaze. Can we escape the conformity of the model consumer manufactured by commercial society?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Painting has lost some of its original lustre, but it reclaims our attention in this new exploration of Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl<\/em>. Postmodern and artificial, it nurtures a Dadaist disillusionment to create a critical space. Between fascination and disenchantment, processes of identity and superficial games, is art still capable of such a feat?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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