Eric Louie: Finding A Way
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Bau-Xi Gallery Vancouver 3045 Granville St, Vancouver, British Columbia V6H 3J9
Eric Louie, "Last Light," 2020
oil on canvas, 75" x 60"
Vancouver-based painter Eric Louie’s latest exhibition, Finding A Way, introduces a new series of intimate small-scale works that explores ideas of symbolism and semiotics while delving deeper into a new format for his ongoing consideration of imagined spaces.
In his large-scale canvasses, the artist’s distinct future-forward aesthetic and formalist sensibility emerges, informing the richly layered virtual worlds of his paintings. These precariously balanced assemblages are charged with dynamic tension, and rife with colourful shapes — at once subject to and defiant of visual gravity. The rich interplay of Louie's forms is at once static and in perpetual motion, synthetic-looking yet singularly organic, shaded with brightly-hued gradients and accented with chrome-like effects to reinforce a sense palpable materiality.
With an expanding painterly vernacular inspired by revisiting past works spanning the duration of his practice, Louie's use or symmetry and canonical forms communicate subconscious associations. Ever-present semblances of the familiar, figments of still-lifes, traces of figures and approximations of landscapes emerge from Louie’s evocative compositions, resisting interpretation and beckoning the viewer towards abstraction.
Eric Louie is a Vancouver based painter, whose vibrant compositions are being recognized by numerous collectors both public and private.
Louie’s current body of work is the culmination of his experiences as a painter. He describes his work as alluding to landscape, still life, portraiture and how those genres surface in each piece; inventing scenes via many thin layers of luminescent glazes. The delicate, yet dynamic forms that he depicts are central to the ‘virtual worlds’ he creates for the viewer to explore.
Louie holds a B.F.A from the Alberta College of Art and Design, where he was awarded the prestigious Jason Lang Scholarship. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including CIBC, Encana Energy, NBC Studios, Paramount and MGM Pictures, as well as the City of Calgary.