Paintings 2000-2008 

In the late summer light, his studio still imbued with warmth, Pierre Dorion retraces with  me his practice and the places that have shaped it. Having spent many years in a studio  on Atataken Street, then in a vast New York loft on Wooster Street, he has now been  anchored in his Saint-Christophe Street studio for twenty-one years. The works gathered  today reactivate this memory of place: some were shown at René Blouin, others never left  the studio. They now come together at Galerie Pangée, just steps from Mount Royal where  the photograph of a broken tree was taken, an image that marks a pivotal moment  between two series and a transition in the artist’s life. 

The exhibition brings into dialogue two bodies of work produced between 2000 and 2008.  Empreintes (2000-2002), never before exhibited, stand out for their experimental  approach, oscillating between organic form, gradient, and the pursuit of chromatic  accidents. Through them, Pierre explores a freer relationship to painting, without the  intention of producing a defined image, instead embracing the surface as a field of  experimentation. These canvases, worked with a spatula, testify to a rawer relationship  with the medium, where trace, pause, and accident are accepted as constitutive of the  image. Inspired by Gerhard Richter yet charged with a spiritual dimension, they situate  themselves at the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious, between  intention and release. 

In counterpoint, Chromatic Bands (2004-2008) follow a rigorous protocol that Pierre calls  his “system”. Each band corresponds to the reserves of paint accumulated in the making  of figurative works: if material was abundant, the band widens; if scarce, it narrows. From  these strictly chromatic decisions emerges a luminous vibration which, freed from any  formalist rigidity, recalls the sensitivity of the Plasticiens while also evoking the perceptual  experiments of Robert Irwin. Although conceptually grounded, these works retain the  materiality and density of painting, its blends and its accidents, extending in parallel the  rigor of the architectural canvases for which Pierre is known. 

Between these two poles, the organic freedom of the Empreintes and the discipline of the  Bandes chromatiques, appears a small figurative painting, Broken Tree (Mount Royal).  Captured after an accident, this fragment of landscape acts as a threshold, linking the  space of the studio to that of the gallery. Here, the image becomes a relay between past  and present, between figuration and abstraction, between intimate experience and  inscription within a broader pictorial history. 

Paintings 2000-2008, conceived as a linear and rhythmic installation, underscores the  dialogue between two parallel practices. The artist punctuates the ensemble with more  marginal works, mirrored series or monochrome variations reminding us that his practice  is not only that of a painter of images, but also of an inquirer into the very conditions of  painting itself. These works are less representations than presences: they carry the  memory of a halted gesture, an energy transmitted, a time crystallized on the surface.  From this exhibition, Pierre hopes that what remains above all is the encounter of these  contrasting universes, the productive tension between rigor and accident, system and intuition. Not a nostalgic return, but a moment of reactivation, where traces of the past  regain a burning immediacy in the very place that welcomes them. As I leave the studio,  the fading August light seems, for an instant, to hold the thread of our conversation. 

- Text by Erika Del Vecchio