Autumn dates for the 5th Vietnamese Cultural Weeks
The relationship with History will be the focus of the exhibition Traces, from October 26 to December 3, 2023 at La TOHU.
Inspired by her travels over the past twenty years, Renée duRocher presents a pictorial universe transcending mystery and exoticism. Long associated with subjects evoking places steeped in history, the artist’s painting is gradually evolving towards renewed references: I’m a painter of intuition, and for a long time my paintings have been associated with places steeped in history. I like to paint in series and question time. The one that passes and leaves traces, the one that means and has duration.
Xanh, one of the two series on show, was inspired by a visit to the northern region of Vietnam. It speaks of the cultural communities who live there and their desire to preserve their culture by passing on their traditions. It’s the perfect expression of the artist’s creative motus operandi. Here and there, the body of work reveals fragments of this journey. Rice paddies, characters dressed in colorful traditional costumes and lush landscapes lend a poetic tone to the journey. Combined with selected moments of the novelist’s life, the selected works are all the more evocative.
The pandemic having deprived her of travel, she turned her attention to her immediate surroundings, and to her great surprise it was the sidewalks that caught her eye: “I wanted to talk about the life that slips through the fine cracks in the concrete, and the traces left by mankind over the years: historic dates engraved on the pavement, footprints, graffiti, not forgetting the yellow bear-steps that line the school path”.
This series is part of our urban landscape, the kind we don’t notice much, but which speaks volumes about our passage.
Painted with acrylics, oil sticks and aerosol, these paintings are executed with great freedom. They represent a break with his work of the last 40 years, where historical motifs and the human figure were always present.
A native of Granby, Renée duRocher has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally since 1976. After a 40-year professional career, she has held over fifty solo and group exhibitions. Her works are now part of public, corporate and museum collections, including those of the Musée des beaux-arts of Sherbrooke, the Musée d’art contemporain of Baie-Saint-Paul and the Musée Pierre-Boucher in Trois-Rivières. Her work in the visual arts and her commitment to the community have earned her numerous awards, including an honorary diploma from the Cégep de Granby and the title of cultural ambassador for her hometown of Granby.
As part of the 50th anniversary of Canada-Vietnam diplomatic relations (1973-2023), the Vietnamese Cultural Center is simultaneously presenting the exhibition Traces until March 29, 2024 at the Espace Québec gallery, located in the heart of the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.
