James Olley transforms the colour white from wintry starkness to pure sunshine. His series of paintings titled Ever After currently on show at Galerie Trois Points glows in bright crayon colours, sometimes applied in spontaneous, gestural dashes, sometimes shimmering through thick layers of white paint. If you spent your morning like most Montrealers – digging your car out of a snow drift, or skipping over puddles of slush on your way to the bus stop – this exhibition will be a welcome escape. Olley transports you to a never-ending summer where lovers embrace in a park or take a stroll down a garden path, and children are playing in their neighbourhood, racing down the street on their bikes. Olley’s images capture the small moments of joy in our everyday lives, those that we are most apt to forget but which are the ones we should savour.
Olley’s generous layers of impasto are so thick that you can still smell a faint hint of oil paint. Thick wads of paint pool at the edges of the stretchers, emphasizing the work’s tactile quality. The artist has developed an unusual painting process: first he paints a scene in a traditional, representational technique, using his palette of vivid candy colours. Then he covers the entire canvas with a thick layer of white paint. While the paint is still wet he traces the contours of the motifs in the underlying painting, revealing the essential lines and objects. This is a nearly instinctive process – he can no longer see the picture, but after having spent so much time painting it he can now work from memory. Using this method Olley highlights the essentials of the composition. Finally he takes a squeegee and applies one rapid stroke of bright colour, at once obscuring and accentuating the core of the image.
Memory plays an important role here – the memory of a precious moment, the memory of an image, and the memory of a painting all become fused in this process. Intense, warm, and sun-bleached, Olley’s works are a welcome reminder of summer romance.
Galerie Trois Points, space 520
James Olley
Ever After
February 18 – March 17, 2012
www.galerietroispoints.qc.ca
