Shadow Boxer, Melanie Authier 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 72"x108"
I'm going to fucking gush about one of my favourite painters for a bit. Melanie Authier describes her own work, saying: "With every painting, my aim is to accomplish a sense of unfathomable space as a result of this jostle of visual language." and I'm gonna just stream of consciousness talk about why I love it.
Augury, Melanie Authier 2010, acrylic on canvas, 60"x72".
I first encountered Authier's work in a gallery in Montreal in around 2011. It was the middle of the day, I was alone and I was going to the show because it featured paintings by a couple of Concordia's professors. It also featured two images, somewhat like the above and I was entirely arrested with the way she paints. Creamy, buttery paintstrokes. Entirely abstract, but with this attention to form that borders eerily close to creating space, and subject.
Psychic's Knot, Melanie Authier 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 56"x66"
She's been exploring this style her whole career and it just keeps getting cooler, to me. It's like fabric billowing on the scale of a mountain range.
Exoskeleton, Melanie Authier 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 72"x84"
They move with a dynamism that I don't see in almost any other paintings. They have an energy that is incomparable. Flower blooms unfolding new dimensions between each set of petals. A steed made of innumerable dreams crashing through walls of reality.
Gravity Heat, Melanie Authier 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 28"x24"
I love when things cut off abruptly. Sometimes I can't tell if there is meticulous masking in the painting process, or if these shards of dimensionality collaging over each other are simply the result of highly controlled brushwork. Either way, I don't know how she kaleidoscope-like folds different realities of colour over each other like I'm looking at the painting through a crystal.
