Renée Duval - BLOOM

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Renée Duval, “Cha u kao,” 2022

oil on canvas, 52” x 56”

Opening Reception, Saturday, May 7th from 2 to 5 pm.

Renée’s work has long been concerned with perceptions of the natural world. In Western culture we tend to see it as somehow outside of ourselves, and we struggle with the idea that we are intrinsically interconnected—that we are it and it is us. In her recent work, Renée uses digital collage to create chimerical “portraits” of human faces fused with plants and flowers.  These images are meant to feel slightly destabilizing or hallucinatory.  SheI also uses symmetry to give the images an impression of iconography, and to evoke a sense of idealized and preternatural beauty. Working with this imagery has allowed her to explore ideas and preoccupations with concepts of beauty, gender, nature and spirituality. 

Amid the many collage images she produces, there are some that she is compelled to develop further by transforming them into large format paintings. The shift in scale, the painting process and the language of painting itself allow her to further articulate and explore points of transition and perpetual shifts in awareness.

The faces Renée uses in are those of drag performers. Already in state of metamorphosis through make-up, costume and characterization, these faces undergo additional transformations when she merges them with botanical growth. In this process, Renée aims for a kind of alchemy where the faces and plants come together and become something greater than the sum of their parts. They are neither fully human nor plant; they may be plant life mutating into human form or vice versa. The interest lies in points of transition; the shift from one perception to another where meaning is flexible and boundless.

Renée Duval has recently returned to Vancouver after living in Montreal for decades. Born in British Columbia, she graduated with Honors from Emily Carr College of Art (1986) and completed an M.F.A. at Corcordia University in Montreal. (1991) Her work has been exhibited across Canada and she has participated in exhibitions in the United States and France. Her work can be found in numerous public as well as private collections and she has received several grants from both the Canada Council for the Arts as well as the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec. Renée's work was included in the publications Carte Blanche Vol 2-Painting (2008) and The RBC Painting Competition:10 years (2008).