Pierre Dorion

Fifteen large and mid-size paintings by Montreal artist Pierre Dorion were presented in his recent exhibition at Galerie René Blouin. These paintings confront us with a simultaneity of abstraction and something photographically derived. Their plain surfaces freed from any expressive brushwork or gesture emphasize Dorion’s attention to a meticulous simplicity. The initial impression is one of paradoxically fascinating resistance. The current exhibition reinforces this as a constant throughout Dorion’s career of several decades even as he changes emphasis across the abstraction/realism spectrum.

For several decades Dorion has been involved in his antithetical play with abstraction. We could equally say he has been perversely pursuing painting’s ruin in the wake of photography. Nevertheless we can’t avoid his singular dedication to the memorialization of place, and of particular places, through his contamination of painting with photography. This contamination leaves a sense of an underlying presence, or more accurately, a sense of a past presence that is absence. Over the years Dorion’s concern for specificity of place and its connection with our experiencing time has moved from his exploring the spatiality of pictorial realism within painting to, alternately, a minimalist sense of installation art. This is to say, he has explored the places of art from perspectives both within and without the frame. During the decade of the ’90s his paintings suggested a transitioning from their reliance on realist modes of presentation to his commitment to a spatiality of anxious instability. His ongoing commitment to this experience of dissonance leaves us wondering if we are “here” or “there,” and are we in “the familiar” or “the strange.”

Doubtless this concern for experiences of pictorial ambivalence brought Dorion to an interest in the mid-19th century Hudson River painters from whom he brought forward a sense of suspension. This tension creates an atmosphere of experience once known as melancholy, that ambivalent encounter with the past, at once painful and constraining yet grounding. No doubt Dorion also has a relationship with the abstract modern painting of Montreal’s Plasticiens whose works dominated the scene from the mid ’50s through the ’60s. That relationship is discontinuous, ambivalent and interrupted by his affiliation with the photograph and its aesthetics of reproducibility posed against the Modernist demand for the immediacy and unity of a work.

To construct a critical painting practice Pierre Dorion has, from the beginning, brought photography and painting into the proximity of one another. With this gesture he reminds us of how photography was once considered to bring about the death of painting. This is not a simple historical point for Dorion, but rather illuminates his concern for working through experiences of time and place, memory and mortality as these occur in the terms of these artistic mediums.

Over the years Dorion’s imagery has become increasingly obdurate. Gone are the frequent views of landscapes and furnished rooms, replaced by an intense focus on exclusionary views of walls, blinds or curtains and especially wall-related architectural details such as windows, doorways, vents. However, landscape and seascape have not entirely disappeared. For example with Saint-Siméon, 2015, Dorion has painted a large six-by-eight-foot seascape that is almost devoid of figuration or detail. What he has emphasized is tonal gradation, sky above fading downward toward disappearance, water below fading upward toward disappearance. Then the absolutely straight and severe white stripe of this “horizon line,” which can also be a reference to the abstract hard lines of les plasticiens such as Gaucher, Leduc or Molinari.

An example of his adoption of the art exhibition space as a subject, Sans Titre (PP), 2015, presents what is arguably a painting of a room, albeit radically generalized. The “(PP)” of the title identifies this image with the Power Plant, a Toronto exhibition space. This painting continues two of Dorion’s familiar practices, one of a composition that places us in a perspectival construction where we stare into a box-like room with implied vanishing point, contrasted by another of Dorion’s favoured practices, that of meticulously painting tonal gradations that rise and descend where appropriate, to define walls and floor. In the depth of this room a doorway screened by a curtain wall bleeds an other-worldly blue light as if in the next room we will find a James Turrell installation.

Dorion practises art as an ongoing dialogue between memory, architecture and photography as they play out in his personal encounter with painting and with place. What is most remarkable, in his translating between the aesthetic and the ethical contexts, is the way that he undermines the certainties of identity. The uncertainty he constructs in terms of his painterly spatial constructions translates into a relativization of any mapping of a margin against a centre. Accordingly, any apparent centrality is multiplied rather than being opposed to marginality; there are only margins. ❚

Pierre Dorion was exhibited at Galerie René Blouin, Montreal, from October 31 to December 19, 2015.

Stephen Horne lives in France and writes on contemporary art.