Renée Lavaillante
ARTIST STATEMENT
Renée Lavaillante works drawing with a preference for paper and blacks. Thoughts on the line, contour, on the space specific to this art form have filled a long period of research. For about twenty years, she has been mainly trying to find another balance for gaze, focusing on questions of control and dexterity inherent in drawing common conceptions. This is how the artist found herself drawing with her eyes closed, with a rebellious tool, or without any tool at all. In order to leave the work’s final aspect open, Renée Lavaillante subjected it to various protocols, predefined actions or circumscribed events, but outside her will, to parametrized hazards, the results of which she accepts as they are. For several years now, she has been reconsidering the ancient vocabulary of drawing, such as squaring off, the underlying drawing, the reserve. In addition, the artist is taking a closer look at recurring motifs in other women artists, such as circles, spirals and repetition.
Renée Lavaillante lives and works in Montreal. She is a graduate of Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV) and Concordia University. Since 1985, she has devoted herself exclusively to drawing practice : autonomous drawings, installations, in situ, books. She has present about thirty solo exhibitions in Quebec, France, South Korea and Italy, and has participated in group exhibitions in Quebec, Great Britain, Belgium and Cuba. She has been artists in residency at the Centre européen d’actions artistiques contemporaines in Strasbourg, at the Studio du Québec in Rome, at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Collioure, and at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. In 2011, she produced a video entitled Le dessin chercheur. In 2016, a monograph on her research as a whole was published under the title Renée Lavaillante, une archéologie du dessin, with a text by Nathalie Miglioli (Occurence/Sagamie, 130 p.). Her work is the result of various protocols and settings that she establishes in order to redefine the constituent elements of drawing, such as information received or transmitted, mastery, accident, etc. (Occurrence/Sagamie, 130 p.). She also often borrows the walking motif to explore the line as a trace of an action of communication. Her work is part of various public and private collections in Quebec and abroad.