Canadian Art: Pierre Dorion
Pierre Dorion has been painting for 25 years. Until you see the dates of the early works in the touring retrospective organized by the Galerie dart du Centre culturel de lUniversité de Sherbrooke, the fact is hardly believablehe is still in his early 40s. Dorion has always made figurative paintings. He started in the 1980s, when the art scene was busy elsewhere. You can see the stress of his isolation in the theatrical address those early paintings possess. By the 90s, however, he had settled into the cool, realistic style of his mature work. What has been impressive since then is how each new painting seems stronger than the last. Theres a seriousness, an almost tragic sense of arrival to the images. Heres a domestic interior. It shows a Fernand Leduc on the wall. With its subtle colour shifts that faintly echo the spectrum, the work is an homage to place, and to painting itself. If there is harshness, it comes at the edges of the drawn blinds, in the white light of the outside world, the light of paintings perpetual underside.
Summer 2003
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