(Images: Healthy, and Oiseau (froid), by Denis Prieur. Photos by Lorne Roberts)Oiseau (glum), by Denis Prieur
La Maison des artistes visuels francophones, 219 Provencher Blvd.
To March 13
When looking at or describing a piece of art, it's easy to throw out adjectives like "fresh", "exciting", "unique", and so on. They're generally quite safe, and can be rather meaningless if you want them to be.
Looking at work by local artist Denis Prieur (he calls them sculptural drawings), any number of those adjective can easily spring to mind. But as always, there's something about cliches that don't quite tell the whole story.
With Prieur, it's almost automatic to call the work "fun", or "child-like" because it certainly is that. It's partly the materials, as his art incorporates yarn and sparkles, and uses plywood, glue, and felt markers as some of its main components.
It feels a bit like looking at work by some weirdly mature little kid, who has managed, by gluing and colouring long enough, to actually come up with some genuinely interesting art.
Of course, Prieur is no-preschooler. He's actually a thirty-something U of M grad, and one of a large crew of mainly francophone artists of all stripe who have come out of St. Boniface in the last decade or so.
Prieur has said in the past that his artmaking was inspired by a time spent living in Asia, in which he found the local scripts to be very beautiful, even though he didn't understand their meaning.
With that idea in mind, his own work often incorporates text that is carefully (one might say obsessively) hidden inside the images. That means that his works are often like heiroglyphics, or puzzles, with something other than the obvious going on.
Influenced by such artists as the American sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who is perhaps best know for a giant three-dimensional hamburger, Prieur creates an unusual hybrid of crude carpentry and Pop Art that still manages to be serious work.
He uses sheets of plywood that are cut into smaller bits, coloured with felts and paint, and then glued on top of each other--sometimes up to six or seven layers deep.
Featuring light, airy themes and imagery such as birds, bits of old advertisements, and travel scenes, there's a collage-style feel to all of his works. It's as if he had cut and pasted bits from a National Geographic magazine, or scribbled pages full of drawings, and then turned them all to wood.
That fun, lively style is part of what makes Prieur's work so visually interesting. It also compensates for the fact that, beyond the recurring theme of birds, the show doesn't have much of an overall idea or theme to unify the work.
Canadiana shows up regularly, though, providing both animal and human scenes. In a work like Migration, a mountain range hitches a ride on the back of a flatbed semi, while Canadian geese fly by overhead. In Lucca (she), we see what looks to be a travel photo, as bits of wood become a Rocky Mountain postcard scene, a woman posed in front of it.
In some works, the breezy humour shows through in the titles alone, which mix English, French and Italian, and which often add to the mystery. In other works, such as his straightforward and lifelike depcitions of birds, the strength of the image alone is enough.
Prieur's only other solo show thus far has been a modest exhibit at a local college. This new exhibit places him among our city's top young artists, and makes him one of a select few who can claim to be doing work that is entirely their own.
