Honor Fraser is pleased to present ACTUALIZED, and it feels so good, an exhibition of new paintings by gallery artist André Ethier.
In his second exhibition with the gallery, André Ethier, a Toronto based painter, continues in the vein of his often surrealistic, mystically narrative, and fantastically grotesque paintings. A sort of dark humor is evident in these intensely colored paintings that balance between the natural world and the mystical world of myth and fairytale.
Ethier evades specific narrative and concrete concept, and works from his own subconscious. His hybrid, folk-like fantasy, sci-fi scenes, still lifes and portraits are equally informed by Old Master paintings, Fauvism, Dutch still life, and contemporary culture and psychedelic rock. Among the artist’s lush bouquets of oozy, dripping flowers are ambiguous one-eyed Cyclops creatures, bearded and long-haired men whose bulbous features threaten to melt into obscurity, and troll people who could have escaped from the pages of the older more gruesome fairytales. (Remember, in the original story of Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off their toes to fit their feet in the glass slipper). Interestingly, Ethier considers this most recent body of work a collection of self-portraits of his own adolescent subconscious.
André Ethier lives and works in Toronto, where he was born in 1977. He earned a BFA at Concordia University in Montreal and has exhibited widely, in Canada and around the world. He has had solo exhibitions at Greener Pastures, Toronto and Derek Eller Gallery, New York.