A Peek Into The Everyday
Marie-Claude Lacroix produces a hypnotic array of contemporary still life paintings, focusing on close-up encounters with materials that evoke destruction and precarity. Glass, metal, clay, tapes, liquids, wood, and transparent papers are zoomed in on her gorgeously realistic yet captivatingly surreal paintings that celebrate the beauty of texture, light, and shadow.
I would describe my aesthetic as being clean, delicate, and graphic – I found it around five years ago, at the end of my Bachelor in Fine Arts. I have always been attracted to realism, but my first years of paintings were such a love and hate relationship. It took some years of technical explorations before the process began to be enjoyable.
Currently in the second year of MFA at Concordia University, in MTL, the artist focuses on painting, reading, and research. Marie-Claude photographs her desired set up with a variety of angles and uses of lighting to find her perfect image, which is then the only thing she refers to during the painting process.
These paintings are the result of a systematic methodology, where mediums accumulate in order to generate incongruous environments. First, I make assemblages that will then be staged in small scale models. Accidents and playfulness are a big part of the process, with the idea of generating a space where a great tension reigns. The multiple altercations of the elements in these images symbolize moments of instability and upheaval. I try to evoke anxiety by depicting subjects that collide, sink, get pierced, tear.
Lacroix is currently working on something slightly different from her usual light and dark still lives. “This series is darker and more intimate. My recent research on control, security, and anxieties made me shift from the very colorful, formal, small paintings I was doing the past years, to the much bigger and somber work I am doing now. I feel it’s more grounded, ambiguous, and sensitive.” Perhaps her work is inspired by recent events around the world that have called her to explore such themes.
Using her delicate technique and studying eye, Marie-Claude Lacroix explores the relation between materiality, vulnerability and ambiguity.
Marie-Claude Lacroix
Article written by Kate Smith
