André Ethier
“Stag Party”
The ungainly face of a man stares at us, crouching under a bush and wearing lowered ladies’ briefs; a woman with two stag antlers appears on the psychedelic background, portrayed through brushstrokes reminding us of certain kind of aboriginal painting; a faun lies in a provocative pose on a bed of ferns, surrounded by the night. These small paintings by Canadian André Ethier remind us of the vivacity of Fauve painting, but the violent chromatic combinations and timbre intensity that give works by Matisse a sense of impregnable serenity, provide life to a sort of macabre Carnival in these pieces, where men, animals and ambiguous creatures parade one after the other and in whose genre and species identity dissolves a pansexual vision of existence. A primitive sense brings back utopian texts by David Henry Thoreau, and the use of vigorous brushstrokes allow the almost total annulment of perspective and the character of the “mask” worn by subjects represented to be revealed. Landscapes rarely appear, and when they do, they are of a bizarre nature, such as a mountain appearing as a belly with crimson-coloured bowels, or as rainbows in the heart of the night. Right from the start, the artist has worked above-all using imaginative portraiture, able to be inspired as much by the history of art as by mass culture such as, for example, horror movies. In a recent series of works, he presented a string of zombies dressed up as hippies, SS officers, skeletons and animated scarecrows. These are works that remind us of the medieval Danse Macabre, the Triumph of Death by Hieronymus Bosch or the Living Dead by Gorge A. Romero, and would seemingly like to highlight the supremacy of Death over ideology, projects of modernity and progress, productivity and consumerist anxiety and of every unrealistic distinction among individuals. The paintings by André Ethier show us man in his pure carnality, as a pale body without a soul. The necrophilic halo, an anti-naturalistic attitude – expressed above-all by an exuberant chromatic palette – and at the same time the profound merger of man with nature, give paintings by André Ethier a tremendously subversive charge. In one of the show’s paintings, a truly ugly woman - wearing a charming dress and particularly graceful – thinks to herself “If this is not incredible, then I really don’t know the meaning of the word incredible". In the light of the phantasmagorical universe that comes to life in these sparkling oil works, one can only agree.
Luca Vona
Galleria Glance
opening September 2nd h. 7 pm
up to October 2nd 2006
Via San Francesco da Paola 48/E
10123 Torino-Italy
+39 3489249217