Lorenzo Dupuis | Tapestry

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Lorenzo Dupuis, “Tapestry,” 2024

(courtesy of the Gallery)

Opening Reception: Saturday April 13, 2 - 4 PM

Art Placement is delighted to present Tapestry, a solo exhibition of new egg tempera paintings by Lorenzo Dupuis. Dupuis has focused almost exclusively on the centuries-old medium of egg tempera for more than a decade, exploring its unique character and stylistic possibilities. These recent paintings showcase his continuing exploration, with exciting new elements and directions.

Dupuis creates his own paint, mixing pigment with egg yolk binder in exactly the same way that artists of the early Renaissance did more than five hundred years ago. Water-based and completely non-toxic, egg tempera is thinner and more translucent than oil. It also dries incredibly fast and is best applied in short strokes with fine brushes, characteristics that have influenced the stylistic aesthetic of Dupuis’ work. His surfaces are built up with many layers of interwoven strokes and hatch-marks, fields of marks that produce a flat, all-over effect. Always evolving, these latest works infuse new elements into the mix: colour that is brighter, bolder, and more varied, as well as larger, flatly painted shapes that punctuate the smaller-scale strokes.

Dupuis plays with contrasts in colour, value, and scale to create a striking sense of form and space in these latest works. In one painting: larger, solidly painted shapes in a variety of colours float above a field of intersecting dash strokes. Compositionally, the work still achieves an all-over effect, but the heightened distinction between figure and ground creates a dynamic push-and-pull, with the “ground” receding further back into the illusory space of the picture than Dupuis’ works typically go. Other paintings incorporate modeling techniques to produce an almost opposite effect: the suggestion of forms that seem to come forward in space. Strategically varying the colour, value, and density of his hatch marks, Dupuis creates the illusion, from a certain distance, of three-dimensional forms that project outwards from the picture plane. Moving closer to the surface, the illusion dissolves and the paintings are seen, once again, as an interlocking matrix of marks on a two-dimensional surface. Throughout these and other works in the exhibition we find a masterful play with the dynamic opposition between appearance and reality that is arguably at the core of all serious painting.

Lorenzo Dupuis completed both a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1975 and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in 1995 at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, the city where he continues to live and work. Dupuis has been the recipient of grants and awards and his work has been reviewed in both French and English publications. He has had over twenty solo exhibitions from Vancouver to Montreal in both public and commercial galleries and his paintings can be found in numerous private and public collections, most notably The Canada Council Art Bank, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, RBC Dominion Securities and the ScotiaMcLeod Collection.