The popular Canadian cartoon “Arthur” probably has the most
straightforward, traditional animation in television today. Surprisingly,
one of the show’s artists is a passionate abstract painter, with an
intriguing exhibition running until Mar. 22 at the Wilder and Davis Gallery.
The artist in question is Concordia alumna Nathalie Savoie, and
fortunately the exhibition is more interesting than its rather plain title
of “Recent Works”.
Savoie uses a semi-automatic approach (don’t worry, it’s
not performance art with rifles) where she basically just lets her work
happen. Yet certain themes and techniques link the pieces as part of a
unified series.
The works, all done with acrylic and coloured pencil on
canvas, have a reflective dreamy quality. Meditative black horizontal bars
with white semi-circles are drawn on top most of the canvases. Recurring
drawings of ladders and chairs float on top an abstract world of textured
blues and green acrylics in several of the pieces. Savoie says that her
works offer a “bridge between abstract and more figurative works.”
The unified oppositions of figurative and abstract art reflect the series’
larger theme of reconciling dualities. In the piece “For
