Francine Savard
ARTIST STATEMENT
Many argue that Francine Savard’s pictorial practice is rooted in Quebec tradition of Plasticiens of the second period (1960s). For her part, she qualifies her work as « pictorial propositions assisted by abstraction models and conceptual tools ». It is, in several respects, with regard to languages problematic, and linked to historical references and various discourses on painting, that the development of her pictorial compositions is organized. They are posed between abstraction and figuration, between painting, sculpture and installation, between visual arts and literature. Whether it is a question of establishing a lexicon or syntactic analysis of critical texts or comments, or whether it is a question of collecting, ordering, encoding or statistical measurement, it is under the aegis of systemic devices and in accordance with a set of rules that translation/adaptation sum of data into pictorial propositions takes place. These data are used to establish components (shapes, dimensions, patterns, colors, etc.) that transform supports into operating structures such as paintings. The appropriation of these visualization processes of information aims at provoking an anamnesis by releasing a certain representation of the real world.
Francine Savard lives and works in Montreal. She obtained a master’s degree in visual arts from UQÀM (1994) and did graduated studies in graphic design at Royal College of Art in London, UK. (1978-1979). Her work has been shown in exhibitions in Quebec and Canada, including Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2017); Le Projet peinture. Un instantané de la peinture au Canada at the Galerie de l’UQÀM in 2013 and since then as a virtual exhibition in partnership with the Virtual Museum of Canada; solo exhibitions at Diaz Contemporary in Toronto; a major retrospective at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2009-2010); Lines painted in Early Spring a cross-Canada touring exhibition (2003-2004); as well as numerous thematic exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Her work can be found in several private and public collections, including World Affairs Canada, National Gallery of Canada, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Francine Savard has been represented in Montreal by Galerie René Blouin since 2001, now Blouin|Division.
Painting is both the subject matter and the form of Francine Savard’s work. Playful allusions to specific moments in the history of modernist practice, her meticulously painted monochrome canvases, often shaped, draw on a complex knot of references to conceptual approaches, motifs and paradigms to renew the poetics of the painted image. [galeriereneblouin.com]