Painting in the Contemporary Moment: Pierre Dorion’s Debate Between Figuration and Abstraction

Pierre Dorion, Vestibule (Chambres avec vues), 2000

Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art features a great monographic retrospective this Fall. Quebec born artist Pierre Dorion has been leading a successful painter career, in Canada and abroad, for almost twenty years. MACM initiative to show his work comes second after Montreal Fine Arts Museum, which had already dedicated an exhibition to the artist in 2010. At a time when painting, and all the more figurative painting is often ostracized from contemporary art, it is a brilliant idea to show a painter’s work which relies on the contemporary problematic of perception through representation.

The museum temporary exhibitions space’s walls are literally filled with about 70 large format canvases. Paintings are hanged chronologically, what allows visitors to follow room by room the evolution of Dorion’s work. No doubt he is a skilled painter. The popular reproach to abstract contemporary painters that they might not master classical figuration painting techniques very well doesn’t apply to him: his strategy towards abstraction partly uses the principles of figuration itself.

Indeed, his signature style is photorealist painting with a constant hesitation between figuration and abstraction. History says that he uses to paint from the photographic snapshots he captures during his morning walks around town. It is obvious that Dorion has been leaning towards abstraction since his debut: the exhibition well-conveys this evolution. The total absence of living representation in his paintings is all the more striking as the scenes Dorion depicts are cold minimalist architectural environments: rooms, corridors, walls, windows, doors that get less comprehensible to the eye as the visitor moves forward in the exhibition.

Pierre Dorion, Intérieur (Fenêtre), 2008

Dorion also includes specific view angles, depth of field and blurry details in his sceneries, just as a camera’s focus would do. The photographic illusionism works rather well in Dorion’s paintings, but some details that would normally be found in a photograph have voluntarily been omitted by the painter from time to time (shadow is the best example). Also, classical linear perspective is intentionally dismissed by the painter, who is progressively leaning towards visual flatness. Dorion creates through those strategies a discourse between painting and photography, in what Walter Benjamin called the “age of the artwork technological reproducibility”. Many claimed birth of photography as the death of figurative painting, for trying to represent reality was no longer a necessity to painting. Abstract painting emerged in the early 20^th century from the double awareness that first, photography was dispossessing painting from its traditional role to represent the Real, and secondly, that attempting to represent the real by any means will always be impossible, for reality relates to subjective perception and specific temporality.

Dorion’s strategy to avoid human figure and to paint figurative yet quite abstract architectural sceneries from photographs is a judicious contribution to this debate. Just like French “Figuration Narrative” painters in the 1960’s, Dorion tried to resist temptation of abstraction in painting, basing his inspiration on photography but also cinema. La chambre verte is probably a reference to François Truffaut’s eponym movie, and the dull artificial lighting in his empty indoor scenes can remind of some fishy B movie. It seems though that Dorion eventually resigned himself to accept total abstraction, as his latest Daniel Buren’s influenced abstract minimalist paintings reveal in the last room of the exhibition.

Pierre Dorion, Gate (The Piers), 2012

Paradox with Dorion is that although his love for painting is evident, he constantly keeps on questioning its legitimacy as a medium for visual perception. Some will find the surgical precision and cold shades of his deserted canvases anxious, but the uncanny halo that emanates will certainly be attractive to the aware eye.

-Camille J.

 Pierre Dorion is represented by Galerie René Blouin in Montreal.

The exhibition is showing until January 6. Free on Wednesday evenings from 5 to 9pm.