Maude Corriveau

For Montreal artist Maude Corriveau, representation of the action of light by using dry pastel – an opaque material with no reflective effects – is a stimulating challenge, upon which she bases her art practice. With a palette of iridescent-seeming colours, Corriveau’s hyper-drawings are the result of work executed beforehand in a part of her studio that serves as a photography studio. In search of optical effects and trompe-l’oeil, she fabricates still lifes using materials selected for their reflective qualities, including dichroic glass, with natural and artificial sources of light. She photographs the ephemeral reflections, digitally manipulates the images, then reproduces them on paper through juxtaposition with fine layers of coloured pigments.

At Est-Nord-Est, Corriveau distanced herself from the photorealism and geometry characteristic of her previous production of drawings in order to experiment with pictorial compositions inspired by collage techniques. She selected and assembled various pieces of textures, forms, and colours from her photographs, creating works that open toward entirely imagined surreal sites in which abstract entities float.

Corriveau also sought, during her residency, to transpose the world of her drawings into three-dimensional space of the studio. Over the course of the winter, she developed methods to connect her paper works with sculptures. Inspired by the rich heritage of the region in wood sculpting, she worked with this hard material to give it a soft aesthetic, starting by making a curved frame and stands with rounded fronts. These sculptural elements echo the motifs found in her ethereal drawings and strengthen the illusion effects. The avenues that Corriveau developed attest to an artistic reflection in which perceptual strategies go beyond the surface of the paper to embrace the potential of installation.