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LORENZO DUPUIS & CLINT HUNKER - QUIET
Reception: Saturday, October 30, 1 - 4 PM
October 23 - December 2
Art Placement is pleased to present Quiet, a two-person exhibition bringing together the works of Lorenzo Dupuis and Clint Hunker. A calming, understated, and contemplative presence unites Hunker and Dupuis’ work. Though the results of each artist’s efforts in the studio are unique and distinct, their intentions are kindred. A version of this exhibition was first presented at the Humboldt and District Museum & Art Gallery in January 2021.

Clint Hunker was born in Regina. He studied at the University of Victoria and the University of Saskatchewan, where he has been a sessional lecturer since 1987. He has exhibited extensively across Western Canada since the late 1970s and his work can be found in numerous public and private collections.

Lorenzo Dupuis was born in Prince Albert. He studied art at the University of Saskatchewan, completing an MFA in 1995. Beginning in the early 1980s, he was a frequent participant in the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops. He has exhibited across the country since the 1970s and his work can be found in many public and private collections.


video produced by Yannick Dupuis

 

Lorenzo Dupuis & Clint Hunker
QUIET

The exhibition that brings together the works of Clint Hunker and Lorenzo Dupuis is not brought about by the usual similarities of subject matter or style that normally dictate such pairings. Except for the fact that both artists work predominantly in paint, there are few literal connections in terms of materials, techniques, subject, style, or palette. At first glance, the artists’ works could not seem to be more different. Yet, there is something about the experience of each artist’s work--their affective quality--that is surprisingly similar. A calming, understated, quiet, and contemplative presence that unites Hunker and Dupuis by sensibility and philosophy, their value systems and approach to art making. Though the results of each artist’s efforts in the studio are unique and distinct, their intentions are kindred. Hunker and Dupuis both have deep roots in the artistic landscape of Saskatoon and Saskatchewan. Born only four months apart, they have both been active for nearly five decades, though it is only within the last two years that they have struck up a rapport, finding through conversation and studio visits that there is much about art that they agree upon. Their separate but parallel stories, now coming together for the first time, tell us much about each artist’s work, as well as the story of the community context in which they were formed.

One of the most notable differences between the two artists’ works is that Hunker is a landscape painter, while Dupuis is predominantly a non-objective painter. With few exceptions, Hunker exclusively explores the landscape as subject. He varies his media at times, including watercolours and drawing in charcoal and pastel, though for more than a decade he has worked predominantly in oil. His colour palette is sophisticated and varied, changing in response to the season he is working in. Winter paintings are often clean, cool, and grey, dominated by shades of white, muted blues and violets, and greyed yellows and browns; summer pictures may feature bright blues, fresh greens, and radiant yellows, though an overcast day can just as easily yield entirely different results. Despite this variation, colour is consistently an assertive element, even if it is subtle and subdued. Likewise, the textural aspect of the oil paint also features prominently in Hunker’s work, with visible, broken strokes and thick daubs throughout. Stylistically, his works are informed by impressionism and other early modern movements, as well as the work of influential local artists such as Reta Cowley, Dorothy Knowles, and Lorna Russell.

Lorenzo Dupuis, on the other hand, has shifted quite dramatically over the last decade towards the realm of non-objective abstraction, in tandem with a shift towards working exclusively in egg tempera. For much of his career, Dupuis was also a landscape painter, producing heroic-scale landscapes in oil. Even then, amongst the group of notable Saskatoon landscape painters, his work always veered strongly towards abstraction. He played freely with colour and texture and never hesitated to stylize and abstract the shapes and forms in his compositions. He was a landscape painter with a loose affiliation to the subject, one of the many local painters heavily influenced by formalism, who looked at the landscape as an armature for an exploration of formal elements. As such, his work consistently settled in the middle ground between representation and abstraction. That balance has continued to shift, now leaning almost entirely towards the latter. Though the occasional figurative or representational painting does still emerge from his studio, for the most part, his recent works emphasize mark-making, pattern, visual harmonies, and other formal considerations above all else. This shift in style is inseparable from Dupuis’ concomitant transition to egg tempera for health and safety reasons. The thick, textural, and brightly coloured surfaces of his earlier oil paintings are not possible with egg tempera, with its much lower viscosity and accelerated drying, which favours short, quick strokes and thin, uniform surfaces. His compositions remain varied, ranging from monochromatic all-over fields of marks and patterns, to traditional figure-ground relationships in high contrast tones, but the palette is noticeably unified and consistently reduced: blacks, whites, greys, and earthy oxides; the occasional red or blue--a far cry from the vivid hues of his work in oil, or Hunker’s for that matter.

Despite these seeming differences, Hunker and Dupuis’ works nevertheless have much in common. Both artists approach their practice from a similar philosophical position, defined by seriousness, commitment, and a respect for history and the sanctity of the artist’s role. The past also remains a powerful source of inspiration. They continue to follow the example of their mentors, pre- and post-war artists undeniably shaped by the significant events of the early twentieth century: The Great Depression, the Dirty Thirties, the prairie dustbowl, and two world wars. These hardships instilled Saskatchewan artists with a practicality and prudence as well as a work ethic defined by focus and dedication. At the same time, the post-war boom period into which Hunker and Dupuis were born also saw an influx of new ideas and influences, as well as local practitioners going out and achieving recognition on the national and international levels. For young artists at the time, it fostered a sense that success at those levels was possible, as Hunker puts it: “the feeling that there was something really happening here.” That sense has waned somewhat over the years, though commitment and dedication remain critical to Hunker and Dupuis, shaped as they are by the context in which they developed, and both also wary of fashion. In their careers, both now going on 50 years, they have seen many things come and go. For them, art making remains a progressive, forward-looking endeavour--their work continues to evolve and advance--but that forward progression is always enriched by looking to the past. In it, they continue to find artists and art works that have lasting strength and relevance--staying power--which is both inspirational and aspirational.

The artistic landscape that Hunker and Dupuis came up in was largely defined by two dominant schools: landscape painting and colour field abstraction. Landscape painting was well established in Western Canada by the middle of the century, originally implanted by the first generation of professional artists: European settlers who imported the artistic traditions of their homelands. Once established, however, the genre had taken on its own unique character, regional in nature and specific to the area. It was a style, manner, and approach to the subject, unquestionably with European roots, but inflected, nonetheless, by the character of the local. The influence of colour-field abstraction that arrived later in the century, on the other hand, signalled local artists’ growing interest in internationalism and the most current developments in modern art. Interestingly, the rising popularity of abstraction never supplanted landscape, which remains a popular genre to this day. Both carried on in concert, a story not of division or separation, but of the blending and interconnection between those two categories; how prairie landscape painters have approached their subject through the lens of abstraction, but also how local abstract painters and their art have been shaped by the physical and visual character of the landscape in this place. Hunker and Dupuis, the former a landscape painter, and the latter working in abstraction, are representative of these two poles and their continuing interconnectedness.

Hunker’s painterly approach--carefully modulated hues of oil paint placed in textural daubs, loosely, yet precisely, on the coarsely woven linen surface--exemplifies this blending of schools. Like the best works of the impressionist masters, his organic lattice of strokes knit together to form the semblance of an image--an impression of the landscape--yet this representation remains unstable, bringing us repeatedly, and inescapably back to the surface of the picture plane. The reality of the picture itself, its status as pigmented goop on a flat, two-dimensional plane, is inescapable. This is the dynamism of representational painting: the back and forth, push and pull, between materials and illusion. Hunker’s approach is decidedly loose, his most recent works tipping very much towards the material side of this balancing act. The effect is that the works feel open, light, and spacious, almost seeming to breathe, to exhale. At the same time, it is also impossible to lose the sense of landscape so intimately embedded within each of his works. The colours are too specific, too subtle. Hunker often paints en plein air, setting up his easel and palette on location in the landscape itself. Working directly from nature accounts for both the immediacy and specificity of his paintings; each picture is of a particular place, at a particular time. They are direct, intuitive transcriptions of his view upon that landscape, in which the focus and concentration of his observation cannot help but come through. Given the contentious politics around land and resources in the current context, Hunker’s approach succeeds because of his humility and humbleness. His works are intimate and personal, small-scale and soft-spoken. They are not heroic paintings expressing mastery or dominance over the land, they come from a position within the landscape; from someone seeking a oneness with the natural world rather than a separation or command of it.

In line with the stylistic and material shifts in his practice over the last decade, Dupuis’ abstract paintings have shifted in scale as well. Still typically larger than Hunker’s works, Dupuis’ reduced scale nevertheless sets his work apart from the expected conventions of colour-field abstraction. Whereas colour-field painters used overwhelming scale to create an immersive experience, Dupuis’ more modestly scaled works encourage a closer, more intimate kind of interaction. Instead of an enveloping colour experience, his rich, deep surfaces are meant to be peered into, functioning almost as a container for the viewer’s experience and gaze to be entered or drawn into. Dupuis’ hand is ever-present in the detailed strokes and hatches. He is an admitted doodler, such that the transition from gestural strokes in oil paint to chirographic notations in egg tempera has always seemed natural and logical. Personal and diaristic, with strong reference to archaic alphabets or pictographic languages, the paintings are a kind of automatic writing. Colour-field abstraction’s assertion that it is autonomous, that it exists apart from or above reality and refers to nothing but itself, is a fallacy that Dupuis steers clear of. His works very much come, consciously and unconsciously, from the sights and experiences of his physical environment, and a search for the underlying order that can be found running throughout. In this way, he continues the tradition of local abstract artists like Otto Rogers, Eli Bornstein, and William Perehudoff, who often distilled elements of the landscape and natural world into their abstract compositions, seeking universal transcendence through a regional lens.

In the end, Hunker and Dupuis are less different than one might think. Instead, they are more accurately two sides of the same coin, or artists who approach the same middle ground from opposing ends of a spectrum. Hunker and Dupuis do not share a common subject or style in their art; rather, they are united by more intangible threads: a shared history, a similar philosophy or approach to art-making--an abstract sense of the “spirit” in which their art is made. They view art making as a productive, generative act; critical positions that seek to tear something down in order to raise itself up have never appealed to either of them. They are similarly wary of the digital age’s rushed pace, shaping a superficial culture obsessed with instant gratification. Hunker and Dupuis, on the other hand, would rather take their time, offering a much-needed alternative to the frantic pace and fleeting relevance of so much in current popular culture. Instead, they choose to make work that is slowly wrought, rich and deep, rewarding those who engage with it in equal measure. Decades into their careers, they are still humbly grateful for each new exhibition and opportunity, because they know these things do not come easily or by right. They must be earned, through hard work, dedication, and commitment.

Installation images:

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