Christie Contemporary is pleased to present Time’s Geometry, opening Friday, June 9 and continuing until July 15, featuring the work of Luce Meunier.

Luce Meunier pursues abstract fields that ethereally hover at the juncture of control and unpredictability. Implementing a programmatic methodology, gesture is largely accorded to the medium itself as waterborne pigments are repeatedly introduced to suffuse surfaces in duration, creating layers of palpably organic forms accumulating in a formal geometry.

With the series, Eaux de surface, Meunier triggers successive layers of pigment moving inward from the periphery to coax fugitive gestures made by time and gravity as paint encounters the canvas surface. In the most recent work of the series, Eaux de surface #9, Meunier includes the centre of the canvas as a point of trajectory, resulting in forms suggestive of a Rorschach-like doubling, but achieved through aleatory approximation. Similarly, Sans titre (Accordéon #5) records gridlines of paint sprayed across pleated canvas at different intervals, with the final set of pleats opened only partially before fitting the work to its stretcher, dimensionally alluding to the process of its making. In both Eaux de surface and Sans titre (Accordéon), areas of the unprimed canvas remain bare, registering the tactility of the woven fabric to underscore the reductive formula of paint, canvas, absorption. With the sculpturally inflected Séquence (bleu/rouge), sheets of folded paper assemble into a horizontal array, as if pages in a book, or book spines on a shelf, edges tinged in undulating densities of red and blue, punctuated by intervals of abutted sheets fully saturated in colour. Meunier clusters the folded sheets so that the physical contours of the top and bottom edges echo the irregular border of colour, to culminate in a kind of “random linearity” characteristic of much of her work.

Meunier’s determinations around the pictorial are almost entirely located within an antecedent conceptualization, predictive of a given medium’s response to a set of conditions — effectively, mapping chance — and activated by time. There is a prevailing imperative to geometry across each series, through mechanisms of the grid, the act of doubling, or repeated forms, and Meunier demonstrates its elastic legibility, with her various processes consistently privileging chance over precision. 

LUCE MEUNIER (b. 1973, lives and works in Montreal) has exhibited broadly in Canada, and her work has been included in numerous exhibitions in public galleries, including Le temps de l’oeuvre, le temps du travail (curated by Katrie Chagnon, a Nicolas Grenier project), Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, 2016; Who’s Afraid of Purple, Orange and Green (curated by Jennifer Matotek), Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, 2014; and La jeune peinture et ses collectionneurs (curated by Réal Lussier), Centre d’exposition Plein Sud, Longueuil, 2013. Luce Meunier was an RBC Painting Competition finalist in 2006. Her work can be found in numerous private, corporate and public collections, including Prêt d’oeuvres d’art, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Bank of Montreal, TD Bank, National Bank, Medcan, and Hydro-Quebec.