Gabriel Lalonde
Gabriel Lalonde (b. 1945) is a prolific poet and self-taught visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice includes mixed media images, sculptures, installations, and published poetic works. His canvases—composed of found materials such as wood debris and clapboard, chairs, empty cans, Barbies, metal, and roof shingles—serve as explorations into the syntax of lost time, eroded existence, faded amorousness, and the general effects of wear and tear.
Where they attest to the dematerialisation of ‘text’ as the signifier of civilised society, his paintings recall Symbolist graffiti, or the calligraphic scribbles of Cy Twombly. Thus Lalonde recuperates and recycles the overspill of speech, religious discourse, and words, processing the detritus of what linguist Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished as la parole (speech) into abstract imagery pertaining to the structure of la langue (language). In this sense, Lalonde’s art can be considered as a factory for the disassembly of verse into semiotic ‘units,’ ‘traces,’ ‘marks,’ and ‘lines,’ which become archeological remainders of the poetic.
Astarte Rowe, curator
Image: Gabriel Lalonde, Barcelona, the Walls, 2014. Mixed media on canvas. 76 x 102 cm.
EXHIBITION: The Amoebic Workshop
September 21, 2016 - October 23, 2016Taking the great Renaissance workshops of Michelangelo, del Sarto, and Veronese as a point of departure, The Amoebic Workshop is an experimental, multidisciplinary exhibition that restages the Old Masters’ studios at a microscopic scale, where single-celled amoebas industriously, and invisibly, craft intricate shells for themselves that embody a uniquely visual aesthetic.
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