Yves Tessier : INVISIBLE À L’ŒIL NU
McBride Contemporain is delighted to present INVISIBLE À L’ŒIL NU, a solo exhibition of paintings by Yves Tessier. Based in Montreal and New York, Tessier is a highly inventive artist who has developed a personal language in figuration, one that is both immediate and richly enjoyable, as well as intricately thoughtful and full of mysteries. A natural born storyteller, Tessier works in casein paints on aluminum panels, deploying a flattened, matte surface, and applying areas of clean, pure colours set off against one another, to emphasize and bring out the iconic and the fantastic from within the everyday. The wonderfully solid and yet dynamic compositions he builds add unique dimension and memorability to the lyrical, humorous and vivid tableaux that he makes. Invoking what is and can be invisible to the naked eye, his way of painting is not about what one sees but what that evokes.
Tessier is both a chronicler and a transformer. On a deep level, one of the most impressive things his paintings and drawings accomplish is the elevation of reportage to the status of a powerful art form. He is steeped in what was once called “genre” painting, scenes of the everyday - he has a knack for finding and illuminating the unusual and the extraordinary within the quotidian, finding the magic and showing it to us. Pop Art and comic books, as much as ancient Egyptian and Greek art, mingle with contemporary influences to create a vignette of perfect proportion in each piece, its symbolic potential and world revealed. The paintings - and drawings - project a beautiful insight into our common humanity that comes through in all these works, shining out with gentle gleefulness and curiosity about and for every human being, every human story.
Yves Tessier is an established painter and drawer born in Montreal who now sustains studios in Montreal and New York City. He presented his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, namely at James Fuentes (New York), Optica (Montreal), SKOL (Montreal), Galerie Laroche/Joncas (Montreal), Art 45 (Montreal), and as part of the London Biennale in England. He is also represented in New York by SHRINE, where he has held three solo exhibitions. In addition, some of North America's most influential publications have reviewed his work, including Art in America, Frieze, the New York Times, Akimbo, The National Post, Le Devoir, and Canadian Art Magazine. In 2021, David Zwirner's online initiative Platform: New York included Yves Tessier's work as a focused presentation of his practice.
