Pierre Coupey: Walking The Cat Back

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Pierre Coupey, "Stanza 55," 2020

oil on paper, 30" x 22.5"

Opening Reception Pierre Coupey: Walking The Cat Back 

Saturday, October 17, 1 ⏤ 4 pm, RSVP required*.

Gallery Jones and Pierre Coupey are pleased to invite you to the opening reception for the exhibition Walking the Cat Back, a collection of new paintings on paper and canvas.

*Please RSVP for a one hour time slot between 1 and 4 pm, i.e. 1 ⏤ 2, 2 ⏤ 3 or  3 ⏤ 4pm.

A little bit about our approach to public health concerns: we will be limiting the number of guests in the gallery to 12 and we ask that guests wear masks. We will be serving drinks in single serving containers from an appropriate distance and with the front door propped open, it's possible to not even touch anything! We look forward to welcoming you to the gallery.

Please note, the Gallery is also open regular hours (Tuesday - Friday, 11am - 6pm, Saturdays noon to 5pm) if you would like to come and see the exhibition at another time, no appointment necessary.

In his work Coupey defies the power structure: breaking it apart and reconfiguring its abstractions into organic markings that take on patterns of their own -- commanding and releasing knowledge at a cellular level of being.

⏤ Charlene Vickers

Gallery Jones is proud to present this show of Pierre Coupey's new work, Walking the Cat Back, which juxtaposes three bodies of work: a continuation of the Stanza series on paper, and large square format works on canvas from the Winter Poem group and the Algonquin group.

All three groups evidence Coupey's abiding interest in poetry and poetics, landscape and history, the terrains of the personal and public past. The Stanza pieces play with references to poets (Apollinaire, Spicer) and unfold like jazz improvisations, setting shapes and colours in swift and surprising contrapuntal relationships. The Winter Poem paintings speak to a season and those times in history that are difficult to endure, that put us collectively to test, that force us to find that which will carry us through to a time and place from which to rebuild. The paintings in the Algonquin group evoke the Laurentian landscape north of Montreal that was Coupey's earliest source of nourishment and inspiration.

Over the course of more than five decades as a non-representational painter Pierre Coupey has deliberately avoided settling into a signature style. His pursuit is the presentation of a material and its range of application. An explorer's zeal for discovery is only half the explanation. The other is his distrust of ease and technical facility. Valuing intuition as an indispensable aspect of the way he paints, once Coupey feels too comfortable, once intuition threatens to become habit, he moves away in another direction. He wants to be off balance, convinced that you have to work in a way that invites the unexpected to discover the unexpected. Painting to see things happen is also central to Coupey's method, both as an intellectual position that explains why he paints, and as a description of the way he physically goes about making a painting. 

⏤ Dion Kliner